CodeRage 2018

Just when I thought conference season was over, CodeRage 2018 came rapidly into view!

I like CodeRage – there’s always a good range of session subjects to choose from, and alwyas a range of good speakers to listen to.

I’ve had sessions at a few CodeRage conferences over the years, CodeRage 7, CodeRage 8, CodeRage XI and CodeRage XII. I’m pleased to continue that trend with a session at CodeRage 2018 – the official web page is at https://www.embarcadero.com/coderage-2018 and the registration page is at http://forms.embarcadero.com/CodeRageRegistration18.

This year I’m presenting my session on Creative Delphi Debugging Techniques. This session has been received positively when I’ve presented a trimmed down version of it to audiences at various conferences around Europe so I thought it would be an ideal session to present in full at CodeRage 2018 and have it available online ongoing.

I’ll be online on Wednesday 5th December at 5pm CST (UTC-6), which is 11pm GMT and the session will last 90 minutes (an hour and a half!). If you can stop by my session I’d really appreciate it, and hopefully you’ll pick up a few tips about some of the Delphi debugger features and possibly lose some of the fear of the CPU window… (yes, we’ll be spending some time in the CPU window!).

Have a fantastic CodeRage 2018!

RAD Studio 10.3 Rio supports Android runtime permissions

RAD Studio 10.3 Rio has just been released for General Availability, as you’ll have doubtless learned from the spree of blog posts on the subject. This is a great new release with a lot of bug fixes and some nice updates to product behaviour and features.

One feature that seems to have not received its fair share of attention in the documentation is the support for the Android 6.0 (and later) runtime permissions model. This caused a bit of frustration earlier in the year when Google changed the Play Store submission rules so that from August 2018 new apps have to follow this new permissions model and from November 2018 app updates also new apps have to.

RAD Studio 10.3 enhances the basic Android support to ensure that Android apps built with Delphi or C++ now understand and can support this new model, which may require a bit of change to your application logic.

In essence, instead of all permissions being granted on application installation, so-called dangerous permissions now need to be requested at runtime where the user can grant or deny them as they see fit. Additionally the user can change their mind in the app settings and toggle the permissions at any time.

The Android RTL has been enhanced with a framework to support requesting permissions at runtime and being notified of the user’s decision, and potentially offering a little explanation for the need for the permission.

As mentioned the documentation for this framework falls a little short right now (at product launch), but hopefully will improve over time. To try and plug the gap I’ve written an article showing how the permission framework can be used, both in Delphi and in C++. If interested in learning more about the Android runtime permission framework introduced in RAD Studio 10.3 Rio, please follow one of these links:

• Runtime permissions in Android (new in Delphi 10.3)
• Runtime permissions in Android (new in C++ 10.3)

Finally, while I have your attention on things Android, I would like to draw your attention to the Android-specific release notes for RAD Studio 10.3. You should read these to be sure of getting on with your first Android project with the new product release. It needs and uses a later Android SDK and NDK and you mat encounter some teething niggles on installation. These notes should help you!

Conferences in Europe

Exciting times – conference season is upon us again and I’m excited to be heading off to a couple of them to talk to Delphi developers around Europe about subjects I’m passionate about.

First off, and it’s nearly here, is the Barnsten Delphi Conference 2018 in Utrecht in the Netherlands on Tuesday, September 18th. This is a one day event with a busy agenda. After the opening keynote from Delphi Product Manager Marco Cantú, I’ll be doing a plenary session on creating debugging techniques before the sessions split into 2 parallel tracks. In among these parallel sessions I’ll talk about Android API access and you can also choose from sessions by (among others) Bruno Fierens, Bob Swart, Danny Wind and Marco Cantú (again). These sessions are mostly in English, though a couple are not. This looks to be a great value day of Delphi expertise.

Later in the Autumn (or maybe it’s Winter by then…?) EKON 22 takes place from November 5th to 7th (Monday to Wednesday, with Wednesday being Workshop day). Again Marco Cantú will be doing the keynote and then we have lots of sessions in 3 parallel tracks, many in German, many in English. I’m presenting my Creative Debugging Techniques session first thing on the Tuesday. Other speakers include Stefan Glienke, Bruno Fierens, Marco Cantú (again), Andrea Magni, Ray Konopka and Cary Jensen (among others). You can peruse the full agenda here.
If you are thinking of going to EKON 22 you can get Early Bird discounted pricing until September 27th (see the registration page). Unfortunately I didn’t get to post about this before the Very Early Bird pricing ended, but Early Bird discount pricing is a good deal!

I hope to see some of you in Utrecht or Dusseldorf!

CodeRage XII session files – Directly Using The Android API

My CodeRage XII session on Directly Using the Android API has been aired on the Internet. If you saw it I hope it came across reasonably well (interruptions notwithstanding) and might prove useful to you in your endeavours with Android.

As promised, the slides and samples are now available at this link. Do enjoy, now ˚◡˚   [ Update: the broken link has been fixed ]

Apologies for the interrupted video transmission during the conference. Rest assured that as soon as Jim can manage it, pretty much all the CodeRage videos will be made available for replay. As soon as mine is available I shall be updating this post with the link and also linking to it on my Conference Talks web page. You can see it at your leisure now here at Embarcadero Academy.

CodeRage XII session

A whole 5 years ago (!) I did a session for CodeRage 7 on accessing the Android API. This was not long after RAD Studio XE5 introduced support for developing Android applications, and Delphi’s Android support was in its first stage.

5 years on and CodeRage XII is starting today. I’ll be doing an updated talk on the same subject covering all that’s new in RAD Studio 10.2 at 3pm CST today, Tuesday 7th November 2017. I hope you can join me!

A full timetable of sessions is available in this PDF download in case you’re having trouble working out which sessions to attend.

Sad for me (due to working on-site meaning I won’t be able to catch them – alas they won’t be made available as replays!) but hopefully fabulous for many of you (if you can attend the sessions) is the inclusion in the list of speakers of a couple of legends in their areas:

• Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob Martin), author of Clean Code, 7am-9am 7th November 2017.
• Steve McConnell, author of the classic Code Complete (among others), 12pm-1pm 8th November 2017.

These are well respected industry luminaries and Malcolm Groves, among others, has a lot to say about them.

Enjoy CodeRage XII!

‘What if?’ scenario analysis in the CPU window

Last Tuesday, 24th October I did some sessions at EKON 21, one of which was on Creative Debugging Techniques. During the session there was a section where I was trying to demonstrate an idea or technique that happened to fully involve the CPU window. Unfortunately a series of finger fumbles on my part meant I couldn’t show what I wanted to show, albeit I think the point was made.

Anyway, I mentioned that maybe I’d write up that little snippet into a blog post, just to prove that it really does work as I suggested it does, and so here it is.

Remote debugger recalcitrance

My development machine in my main week day job does not have some custom hardware that a nearby test machine does. It doesn’t make sense to load up the development environment onto the test machine for various reasons, so I am a fairly irregular user of remote debugging against my Win32 application.

As it happens the client language is C++Builder (classic compiler), but I expect this issue to apply equally to Delphi (I’d be interested to know from anyone who can confirm one way or another).

Remote debugging works quite nicely via PAServer. It is certainly straightforward in comparison to the games we had to play some years back – PAServer seems to have simplified the setup quite nicely.

Granted, stepping is pretty slow, but then there’s quite a lot going on and a certain amount of information for PAServer retrieve from the remote debugger (rmtdbg250.exe) and then to send back to PAClient and to the IDE, so I can take that.

What gets my goat, though, is what happens when the program ends. Often I have to kill the application (Ctrl+F2, or Run, Program Reset), but often the application exits quite naturally.

More often than not I can’t make a change in the code and have F9 successfully compile and run up the app remotely again. I get this:

[PAClient Error] Error: E0009 Cannot create file "\\?\C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\PAServer\19.0\scratch-dir\some_subfolder\project_name\project_name.tds". The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process