Toronto Delphi Users Group

Come join us for the first of two meetings that will be dedicated to the topic of unit testing and TDD.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2016
Fairview Library – 35 Fairview Mall Dr, North York – Room 4
6:00PM to 8:00PM

We’re back from our summer break.

This month we will be talking about the very broad and sometimes controversial topic of unit testing, the value of unit tests and test driven development (TDD) and the different tools that are available to get you up and running.

I obviously think these are useful techniques, and I will try to explain why I think so, but we want to hear your stories and anecdotes, too. Both for and against. If you have some specific questions or things you would like to see covered, please let us know in the comments and we will do our best.

I expect this to be a lively discussion. So lively that I doubt we will get to everything in one meeting, so the October meeting will also be about unit testing, covering some of the things we don’t get to this month and answering some of the questions that come up.

I’m looking forward to this one. Please join us.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2016
Fairview Library – 35 Fairview Mall Dr, North York – Room 4 (I think)
6:00PM to 8:00PM

About the location: The Fairview Library is on the north side of the Fairview Mall. Subway service is available and parking is free. Our September, October and November meetings will be at this location.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on the latest version of Delphi, Embarcadero is making their Starter edition free for a limited time.

http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2016-august-free-delphi-training.html

Thanks to Warren Postma for giving a great presentation on some different bug tracking software and the benefits of integrating them with your source control software (see May meeting).

One of the things that struck me was how easy it is to include rich content (formatting, images, etc) and links to other issues and source code. The functionality goes well beyond a simple list of bugs and includes project planning, research and documentation.

Warren showed off pieces of Redmine, Github (includes issue tracking)  GitLab and Jira (makers of BitBucket), but there are lots of options available.

Here is his summary:

As mentioned in the meeting, I don’t necessarily agree with his last point and prefer the idea of hosting in-house. Fortunately, most of the popular products have options to host your content for you or to have you host it yourself.

I will set up a new source control and bug tracking environment myself and see if I feel the same afterwards.

We are taking our summer break, so no meetings are scheduled for July and August. We will reconvene in September. Stay tuned for details.

Correction: Warren showed off GitLab, not GitHub. My mistake.

Warren Postma will be talking about bug tracking software, also known as issue tracking or project tracking software.

Whether you are a solo developer or you are working on multiple projects with other developers, if you have ever been tempted to create a text file todo list or a spreadsheet or even build a home grown app to manage the features and bugs that you need to deal with so that nothing falls through the cracks, then bug tracking software can absolutely make your life easier, and there are lots of options available.

Last month we talked about source control software. A lot of popular bug tracking software integrates with popular source control software, making it easy to track what is fixed and when and putting check-ins in context with references to the bugs or features that they address.

Please join us.

Thursday, June 30th, 2016
North York Central Library – 5120 Yonge Street
6:00PM to 8:00PM

This will be our last meeting before the summer break. We would love to hear what you about would like to see presented when we resume in September. Here are a couple of ideas:

– Building multi-tier applications using DataSnap
– Unit testing and TDD (this will probably cover two meetings)

Let us know what you think.

We talked about version control software. Here are some of the links were discussed:

There are lots of options available. Fortunately, the most popular ones are also free and include Subversion, Mercurial and GIT.

Subversion uses the centralised model while Mercurial and GIT are distributed. There are technical differences, but one of the things I like best about the distributed model is how easy it is to continue working without being connected to the central repository.

If you don’t want to use the command line interface, all three of these are supported in the Rad Studio IDE. My personal favourite is a free shell extension called Tortoise, which is available for Subversion, Mercurial and GIT among others. Yet another free tool called SourceTree supports both Mercurial and GIT.

Setting up your own hosting isn’t difficult in most cases, but there are free services for both public and private repositories that make them easy to share, offer additional tools or just let you keep your source code off-site for safety purposes. These include GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab.

We will be talking about source control and how it can help improve you software projects.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016
North York Central Library – 5120 Yonge Street
6:00PM to 8:00PM

Note the date change. We are meeting on Wednesday. I will post a reminder before the meeting.

Getting back to our semi-regular series on software development best practices, we will be talking about Source Control, sometimes called Version Control.

We’ll talk about why you would want to use source control, how to get started and some of the unexpected additional benefits that it can have on your software development projects. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. In fact, some of the most popular options are completely free and you can get things set up in a few minutes.

Please join us and share your experiences.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2016
North York Central Library – 5120 Yonge Street
6:00PM to 8:00PM

Open Tools API

Warren Postma showed us different ways to write plug-ins for the Rad Studio IDE and explained the pros and cons of each approach.

One of his examples uses the Castalia Delphi Parser to look for badly aligned begin/end statements or evil WITHs in the current unit. For the purposes of this discussion, an “evil WITH” is defined as absolutely any use of the statement. This alone made the whole night worth while. Nick Hodges would be proud.

Here are his notes:

Each sample repository contains a readme in html format with some notes and links. You can browse the code online or grab a copy (clone) with mercurial, using the repo link, or you can go to the download tab (links shown below) to download a zip copy.

The recommended way to use the helloworld samples is to open them up and build them, then install them and try them, then poke around the code and find how it works by reading it. There’s not so much code there, and almost all of it is important, except you can ignore the castalia parser code which was put in there just to make it easier to get it integrated when you want to have a pascal parser library in a real world expert, as shown in the last of the three demos.

The first of our three demos, the hello world Wizard sample shows in Package (BPL) form, how to use the open tools api Wizard interface.It may seem easier to use but the limitations and annoyances of a BPL wizard are severe and it is not a recommended approach for most IDE plugin requirements.

repo: https://bitbucket.org/wpostma/helloworldwizard

zip: https://bitbucket.org/wpostma/helloworldwizard/downloads

The second demo, the hello world Expert sample shows in an Expert DLL form, how to use the most central open tools api  Expert  interfaces.  It shows how to export the registration function from the DLL, how to integrate with the IDE about box and IDE splash screen including a little icon that shows while Delphi starts up, and how to add a menu item in the main menu and add a menu item in the project right click menu, how to integrate with the IDE Insight feature, and how to make keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) work.

repo: https://bitbucket.org/wpostma/helloworldexpert

zip:  https://bitbucket.org/postma/helloworldexpert/ownloads

Finally a third demo that actually tries to do something interesting using the open tools APIs. Since the above helloworld expert is only a skeleton, and while useful as a starting place for someone who wants to write a wizard, doesn’t actually do anything that you might want to do and is certainly not something you would find you couldn’t live without, I wanted to make a demo that while not yet an invaluable tool, shows some of the potential for wizards. This one implements a custom parser, grabs the currently selected editor window and checks the code inside for two kinds of problems. The first is incorrect use of the WITH statement. All uses of WITH are incorrect, and should be killed with fire.  Secondly, it tries to line up your begin and end statements and see if they match up. If they don’t match up, it tells you. If your code is nicely formatted and free of With statements, it is pronounced good.

repo: https://bitbucket.org/wpostma/parserexpert

zip: https://bitbucket.org/wpostma/arserexpert/downloads

If you are interested in more information on this subject, there is a Google+ Group dedicated to the Open Tools API.

If you really want to dig in to it, then David Hoyle has written The Delphi Open Tools API Book.

Delphi 10.1 Berlin

Embarcadero released the latest version of Delphi on Tuesday, April 19th – Delphi 10.1 Berlin. Just in time for Warren to give us a first look.

Embarcadero had an introduction webinar. If you missed it, the replay is available now.

Aside from the features, Malcolm Groves commented on the the progress with regards to bug fixes and Delphi’s “Quality, Performance and Stability” efforts.

Meeting Location

This meeting was at a new location, the Fairview Library, which is in the north of the Fairview Mall plaza. The Sheppard subway ends here and free parking is available. And apparently, it’s easier to book rooms.

Rick Dermont gets credit for finding this location. We will probably use it for future meetings.

Please let us know what you think.

Our next meeting will be Wednestay May 25 in  Room 1 from 6pm to 8pm at the North York Central Library. Please join us.