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Delphi

Why a “case of” statement in Delphi is a dangerous idea

Over and over, people ask the case .. of statement to be expanded to allow strings, i.e. Looks nice, doesn’t it? Sure, but the devil is in the details. Strings are complex data types, and comparing strings is not a straightforward tasks. If you use just a single, simple encoding, and a simple language like […]

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Delphi

Mom, a modal loop ate my service messages!

A colleague of mine was using the “modernized” service implementation I wrote about some time ago. His services needs to be notified when a user logs on/off or locks/unlocks the machine. Everything was fine for a while, until he started to complain it worked for a while, but then, “randomly”, notifications weren’t triggered any longer. Debugging, he […]

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Delphi

Modernize you Delphi Windows application: use Windows 2000 (and later!) services.

No, the title of this blog post is not a mistake. Delphi, including XE7, only implements services using NT APIs obsoleted since Windows 2000. Windows NT was EOLed in 2004, 2000 in 2010, and XP last year, yet Delphi still doesn’t take advantage of the new APIs. What are the advantages? Well, using the “extended” […]

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Delphi

Local elevation points in Windows and Delphi

Since the introduction of Windows Vista and the new security model for applications, application running under User Account Control (UAC) should adopt a “least privilege” model, running as an “unprivileged” user almost all the time, and requesting higher privileges only when needed, even if the user has those privileges. Requesting higher privileges is called “elevation”. […]