Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Today, I found another example of a common mistake, a unit with global constants. I guess most of you know this situation. There is a value that is used several times in a unit and you declare a constant for … Continue reading →

Sometimes it happens that I would like to convert a Delphi object to an interfaces. Interfaces offer some advantages. On the one hand you can handle different objects that are not derived from a common hierarchy but share the same … Continue reading →

Since records offer methods and properties they are often used to replace objects. This is possible if there is no need to use inheritance. But there is a significant difference between both. References to objects are like pointers to a … Continue reading →

I guess that everyone already had to solve this small issue. There are two variables, one with a path, the other with the filename and they have to be combined. In the old Delphi world there is the function IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter … Continue reading →

This week I found a new interesting piece of code. Someone wanted to initialize a string with a special length of the same char. procedure TMyClass.Init; const cBufferLength = 100; var I: Integer; begin … FBuffer := ” for I … Continue reading →

Today I found an example of the abuse of a try.. except block. procedure TMyClass.DoSomething; var sValue: string; iValue: Integer; begin … try iValue := StrToInt(sValue); except iValue := 0; end; … end; The idea is simple. StrToInt converts a … Continue reading →

Because of my post about the Switches I would like to mention some things about records. Records are are nice way to do things in an object-oriented way without the overhead of real objects. In the unit System.IOUtils you can … Continue reading →

Normally constants improve the readability and maintainability of your code. One example is the minimum value of a single. You can find it in the unit System.Math: … const MinSingle = 1.4012984643248170709e-45; … Instead of writing the float value it … Continue reading →

During the last weeks it happened often that I had to write some command line apps. The reason for this is that more and more things are running automatically in tools like FinalBuilder (I will write an article about this … Continue reading →

Today I found another common mistake. Someone used more than one object and has to free them. var pObject1: TMyObject1; pObject2: TMyObject2; begin pObject1 := TMyObject1.Create; try pObject1.DoSomething; pObject2 := TMyObject2.Create; try pObject2.DoSomethingElse; finally pObject2.Free; end; finally pObject1.Free; end; end; … Continue reading →