Archive for 04/2004

Forms in DLLs Thursday, April 29, 2004 02:42 PM
Every now and then, a question comes up on the Delphi newsgroups regarding forms in a DLL. The questions vary, but the principle is always the same. The developer writes an application using Delphi and the VCL, the creates a separate DLL using containing VCL forms. For some mysterious reason, forms in the DLL do not behave as well as forms in the main executable. What's mysterious to me, actually, is that Delphi has been using the same VCL architecture for over nine years now, and people are still surprised by this. The reason forms in DLLs behave differently is simple - the VCL was not designed to support applications that are split into DLLs. Read more...

Page 23: Everybody else is doing it, so why can't we? Tuesday, April 20, 2004 09:07 PM
I shall only look up and say "Who am I then?" -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland The meme says: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions (watch how it is spreading on the blogsphere here or here) via Anders Ohlsson's weblog.

PINVOKE.NET Tuesday, April 20, 2004 12:34 PM
PINVOKE.NET is a repository of PInvoke signatures - an invaluable resource for anyone accessing Win32 functions in .NET.

SID Tuesday, April 06, 2004 12:36 AM
I meant to write about this but forgot. Then I remembered, so here it is. Someone has asked in the Borland newsgroups for a Delphi program that: Displays a simple form with one button on it. When the button is pressed the program will show the user's SID as a string. Will not use the ConvertSidToStringSid function because it is only supported in Windows 2000 and higher. It looked like a fun exercise, and I had some code I could use, so I wrote it and posted the link (which caused some confusion, since I gave the solution for free while the original poster offered to pay). Anyway, if you're interested, here it is (the ZIP file contains the source code and the compiled executable).

Waiting for Computers Saturday, April 03, 2004 11:03 AM
I spend a great deal of my life waiting for computers. You probably do, too. In fact, considering Moore's law, it's pretty amazing that we spend so much time waiting for the computer to finish a task, return a result, or sometimes even respond. Read more...