Little things make a big difference

Just wanted to share this post from Bob Keeney, one of the 'gurus' of RealStudio development:

BKeeney Briefs » Favorite New Feature in 2011 Release 3


If you use graphics a lot in your projects, you’ve probably found Real Studio to be a painful to use at times.  If you changed the graphic file, you would have to reload the project for it to take effect.  If you found that to be a pain too, then 2011 Release 3 contains much goodness for you.


I discovered this today while I was adjusting my window layout.  I decided that my BevelButton icon needed to be 48×48 rather than 32×32.  I had the Window editor still open when I copied the graphic with the same name as the old one into the same location.  A few seconds later the BevelButton updated with the new icon with no actions taken by me.  Yay!


Of course, it’s possible this has been in Real Studio for a couple of releases until now but I’ll give the credit for this release.  Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happy.  :)

Multithreading in RealStudio - avoiding a common pitfall

I've been working on a new project (more details later), which requires a background thread to perform some processing quite frequently. Everything was going fine and all testing was going great, until I started to increase the amount of data in the application.
Suddenly, things seemed to slow down dramatically. I thought this was  due to too much processing in the paint method of a custom control I had created, so I stripped it down as much as possible, removing a lot of the functionality which I would have to replace later. But, none of this seemed to fix the issue.
After a few days, I realised that there was one area, I had not touched: the background thread.

To cut a long (and quite painful) story short, I had treated the thread as I would have in Delphi, Objective-C or any other language I have used in the past. These other languages allow for true multithreading. RealStudio, does not. Rather than having the OS handle the threading, RealStudio uses it's own thread scheduler.

Turns out the fix was this was very simple. In the loop, within the threads execution, I place the following line:

App.YieldToNextThread

before the end of the loop. This allowed the application to perform other actions required in the main thread.

Some old, but useful code

Digging through some archives, I found some useful code, so I thought I would share these.

These snippets are from my Delphi programming days, so the code is in Pascal, but it can easily be converted to whichever language is being used.

Hide an application from the taskbar - Delphi

This is a really simple technique that can hide your application from the taskbar.In your main forms On Create event, type the following code:

SetWindowLong(Application.Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE, GetWindowLong(Application.Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE ) or WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW and not WS_EX_APPWINDOW);

That's all there is to it.

Making a program run at Windows startup - Delphi

On your programs Settings or Preferences form, place a TCheckBox with the caption Run at Windows Startup.

In the forms uses clause, include the unit Registry.

In the TCheckBox On Click event, include the following code:

procedure TForm1.TCheckBox1Click(Sender: TObject); 

     var Registry: TRegistry; 

 begin

      Registry := TRegistry.Create; 

      Registry.RootKey := HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE;

      Registry.OpenKey('Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run', false);

      If TCheckBox1.Checked then 

          Registry.WriteString(Application.Title, Application.ExeName) 

      else Registry.DeleteValue(Application.Title); 

      Registry.CloseKey; 

      Registry.free; 

end; 

To ensure that the TCheckBox displays the current status of the function when the form is displayed, we need to insert the following code into the forms On Show event: 

procedure TForm1.FormShow(Sender: TObject); 

    var Registry : TRegistry; 

begin 

    Registry := TRegistry.Create;

    Registry.RootKey := HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE;

    Registry.OpenKey('Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run', false); 

    CheckBox1.Checked := Registry.ValueExists(Application.Title); 

    Registry.CloseKey; 

    Registry.free; 

end;

This code simply checks to see if the run command for the appllication has been inserted into the registry. If it has, the the TCheckBox is checked, otherwise it is not.