Delphi Programming Tips & Tricks

We are only few a years away from celebrating Delphi's thirtieth birthday. Because it has been here for quite some time, many Delphi projects are far from being brand-new, and almost every Delphi developer is or has previously worked on a project that can be considered a legacy project. Maintaining legacy projects is painful. Moving them to a newer Delphi version is even more so. A recently published book, written by Delphi expert William Meyer, "Delphi Legacy Projects", can help you ease some of that pain. It will guide the transformation of your legacy projects, help you bring them up to date, and make them more maintainable. Removing cruft, better organization, and less unit cycles can also significantly improve compile speed and IDE memory consumption. The book starts with an analysis of general problems in legacy projects and then presents strategies, one by one, that will help you tackle each individual problem. From project management issues, through dealing wit

 I have published initial release of NX Horizon Event Bus for Delphi as Open Source on GitHub. Features implements the publish/subscribe pattern, decoupling publishers and subscribers events are categorized by type any Delphi type can be used as an event supports four types of event delivery: synchronous, asynchronous, synchronous in the context of the main thread, and asynchronous in the context of the main thread provides generic record and reference-counted class wrappers for easier usage and management of existing types as events simple in both implementation and usage fast full thread safety https://github.com/dalijap/nx-horizon

Anonymous threads are simple to use and are highly appealing when you need to quickly put and execute some small piece of code in a background thread. They work great when they run and complete, but if you have such a thread running when you close the application, all hell can break loose. The main cause of trouble with anonymous threads is self-destruction on completion. Because of that you cannot store a reference to such a thread and therefore you cannot wait for its completion during application shutdown. Other custom threads which have the FreeOnTerminate flag set to True also suffer from the same problem. During application shutdown, such self-destroying threads will keep running until they are just killed by the OS, because their owning process exited. This means they can be interrupted at any point during their execution, and they can access shared data long after that data has been destroyed during shutdown. If you want to avoid unexpected behavior and crashes during app