CodeSnip Blog

➣  For info see this post on the DelphiDabbler blog .

It's becoming a bit of a pain maintaining this blog just for CodeSnip and the Code Snippets Collection while also running the more general DelphiDabbler blog. Given this blog has a much smaller readership than the DelphiDabbler blog I've been cross posting CodeSnip news on that blog for quite some time now. So, in future, I'm going to post CodeSnip related news to the other blog and will cease using this one. For a time I will probably do a stub post here linking to any relevant new posts on the main blog. Eventually I'll freeze this blog completely. This blog will remain up, partly because CodeSnip has a help menu item that links to it. That may change in future CodeSnip releases. Should anyone have just cause or impediment as to why I really shouldn't do this, please tell me in the comments.

It's nice to be able to release a version of CodeSnip containing new features instead of bug fixes. Except that this release also includes bug fixes, including episode 3 of the hibernation bug fix saga. So what's new? Not a lot except for some new snippet export options: For the longest time you've been able to get a copy on the clipboard all the information about a snippet that gets displayed in the detail pane. Now you can finally save the information directly to a file. The only option is Rich Text Format just now, but more formats may make an appearance later. When exporting Pascal units and annotated snippet source code various formats can be chosen. HTML 5 format export files has now joined the list or plain text, Pascal, RTF and XHTML Some annoying, but relatively trivial bugs have also been fixed. Go see the change log if you're curious. But I can't close this post without mentioning the hibernation bug fix saga. A third fix of the bug where CodeSnip someti...

It had to happen didn't it? Not long after my post about yesterday's bug fix release of CodeSnip, Oliver reached out to point out a potential problem with the way I'd implemented it. See the linked post and comments if you're interested in the details. Suffice to say that the problem was sufficient for me to hunt for an alternative solution. Having found one I've rushed out hotfix v4.24.2 to patch yesterday's release (v4.24.1) and make it more robust. Whether or not you downloaded yesterday's you really should update CodeSnip to the hotfix release. ⮞  Get hotfix release v4.24.2 from GitHub . The fix involves a dirty hack of which I'm deeply ashamed, but it works. To be up-front about how horrible this hack is I've liberally sprinkled comments that include the text "!! HACK" in the code. Also, any new methods and fields that implement the hack have names prefixed with  _HACK_ . I need to get this patch out, so don't have time to explai...

What a red letter day. 🎆🎇🌠 For several years a nasty access violation bug has been lurking inside CodeSnip . It crashed the program when the computer was resumed from hibernation, but only sometimes. Because the bug was intermittent and required numerous hibernation / resume cycles to be run before it finally cropped up it defied diagnosis for a long, long time. Until now. Or up until someone finds my fix doesn't work for them! The bug fix release is v4.24.1 - get it from GitHub . Read on if you're interested what the problem turned out to be . CodeSnip uses a custom drawn tree view control to display the available snippets, grouped under headings. A custom TTreeNode class is used that has an extra property that references an object instance that provides extra information about the item been displayed. This information is used by the custom drawing code. The problem is that, occasionally, when waking from hibernation, Windows destroys and recreates the window handle of the...

Version 2.2.3 of my Pascal  code snippets collection  has just been released.  Unlike the previous bumper release, this one adds compilation results with Delphi 12 for all snippets that hadn't been tested with that compiler, which was most of them. It also fixes a couple of bugs, so I recommend updating to this release. For details of the bug fixes, see the  change log . If you are using  CodeSnip  v4.16 or later then you can update your snippets collection by using the  Database | Install or Update DelphiDabbler Snippets Database  menu option and following the instructions in the resulting wizard. ➤ You can find the new release on   GitHub .

Version 2.2.2 of my Pascal code snippets collection has just been released.  Don't let the patch version number bump fool you. There are a lot of new snippets in this release. In fact, it's the first time in years that so many new snippets have been added. Nearly all the new snippets are mathematical. A few snippets were added to the Arrays category, but most got grouped into the Mathematics category. Some snippets relate to number theory while others work with numbers in different bases. However the majority relate to statistics, including functions to calculate Arithmetic, Geometric, Harmonic, Logarithmic and Power means. I'm not going to list them all here, that would be tedious. See the change log for a full list of the new functions & other changes. A couple of existing snippets have been modified, in one case to fix a bug.  Unit tests have been added for every new snippet and for one existing snippet. All the new snippets compile without problem with Delphi XE...

CodeSnip v4.24.0 has just been released. There's no main feature in this release. It's a bit of a mish-mash of numerous minor bug fixes and tweaks that have been implemented since the previous release. I'm not going into detail about the numerous small changes here: check out the change log if you're interested. Do you need this release? Well, its not going to knock your socks off, but there are a couple of bug fixes, so installing it wouldn't do any harm. ✅ Get v4.24.0 from its GitHub releases page .

CodeSnip v4.21.2 has been released today, 14th July 2023. This is a patch release that fixes a few minor bugs: Fixed some broken and "unsafe" (http) links in the about box. Fixed error in version information. Fixed potential XSS vulnerability in JQuery code used in the program's easter egg . Updated and clarified license & some other docs. Do you need this release? Depends on how much you're bothered about the above errors. Up to you. ⏬ Get the new release from the  v4.21.2 release page  on GitHub.

Back in December 2022 I was quite pleased with myself for releasing the v4.21.0 update to CodeSnip . The main feature that was added in v4.21.0 work fine - automatically detecting un-registered Delphi compilers at start up - worked fine. But, oh dear, the more obscure new feature that lets you use lists in snippet descriptions was a bit of a disaster. The main implementation of lists was a bit flaky, but the main problem is that I forgot to add the implementation of lists in snippets reports and in source code comments in generated units. This pretty much trashed the reports and comments. It's taken a lot of coding to fix these bugs, hence the 4 month delay before this bug fix materialised. But I think I've managed it, although whether the new feature was worth the effort is debatable. ⏬ Get the new release from the v4.21.1 release page on GitHub. Here's what a snippet looks like in the UI when it's description contains an unordered list: Here's how the same snippe...

To close off the year, here's a new release of CodeSnip  that adds a couple of new features that have been in the pipeline for quite a while. The first is one I've been working on ever since a user missed out on getting Delphi 11.x Alexandria support when I added it. He expected CodeSnip to just use it when test compiling snippets. It didn't do that. I think his expectation was valid, so I decided to make CodeSnip a bit cleverer! Until now, when support for a new Delphi version was added to CodeSnip you would have to remember to tell it you wanted to use the new compiler, if you had it installed. Now, when CodeSnip starts it checks if there are any versions of Delphi on your system that are not registered with CodeSnip for use when test compiling snippets. If it finds any it offers to register them for you. This feature only works for any version of Delphi that CodeSnip knows about, which for the moment is all of them from Delphi 2 to Delphi 11.x Alexandria. This doesn...

Just released  CodeSnip  4.20.2 which is a bug fix update to CodeSnip 4.20.1. It fixes a bug in the main menu of the UI. To replicate the bug: Drop down a main menu item. Select an item on the dropped down menu using the cursor keys. Do not press enter. Press F1. This raises an exception in CodeSnip prior to v4.20.2 This release also update Windows OS Version detection to correctly detect Version 22H2 of both Windows 10 & 11. Because of the bug fix, I do suggest updating. As usual you can download the program from  GitHub  or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both  SourceForge  or  GitHub . Alternatively you can fork away in the  GitHub repo  - the master branch always contains the source of the latest release, while the develop branch has the latest development source and may not be stable.

Just released CodeSnip 4.20.1 which is a bug fix update to CodeSnip 4.20.0. It fixes a problem in the library that detects operating system version information and makes a few minor documentation changes. There are no changes to functionality. Because of the bug fix, I do suggest updating. As usual you can download the program from  GitHub  or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both  SourceForge  or  GitHub . Alternatively you can fork away in the  GitHub repo  - the master branch always contains the source of the latest release, while the develop branch has the latest development source and may not be stable.

Here's the first CodeSnip update of 2022! First, there's an option to delete your user database if you really want to. Why would you do this? Well there's one possible reason and that's explained in this FAQ . The second main change is that now the size of font in the detail pane can be customised from the Display section of the Preferences dialogue box. This setting applies to all text in the pane with the exception of the source code. The size of the source code can be changed from the Syntax Highlighter section of the same dialogue box. While we're taking about the user database, I also fixed a bug that let you try to backup or move a non-existent user database, which wasn't pretty. There are a few other minor tweaks that you can read about in the  change log . As usual you can download the program from GitHub or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both SourceForge or GitHub . Alternat...