procedure MyImpersonateUserToken(UserName : String; out UserData : PUserData);
begin
//get user token here
Win32Check(GetUserToken);
//get user information from token here and store it into UserData
Win32Check(GetTokenInformation);

Win32Check(ImpersonateLoggedOnUser(token));
…
end;

Sorry. You are right. But only partially

Since Delphi interfaces are completely decoupled from COM (i.e. they don’t depend on COM, they just use the same internal structure so it is easy to consume COM interfaces), you don’t get the bloat that prevents you to be portable. As a matter of fact, descending from TInterfacedObject and using interfaces works just as well in Kylix and Delphi .NET as it does in Delphi Win32.

I find Delphi 2010, 2007 and 7 the most stable versions so far. Delphi 2010 is about as fast as Delphi 7 once was, but Delphi 2007 is not that much slower.
Lately, I had to do some maintenance in Delphi 7, and it was a pain going back so far. It lacks so much productivity I have now (and I do a lot of coding that does not use the form/frame/datamodule designers at all).

@Roddy: read this piece by Allen Bauer about finalizing records: http://blogs.embarcadero.com/abauer/2008/09/18/38869
It is tricky, but can be done.
But you should hide that stuff as deep as possible though

–jeroen

–jeroen

@Ali: thanks, wasn’t aware of it. However, others seem to disagree that this is a full replacement and given the quality of BDS 2006 when I bought it, I’m not ready to shell out another few hundred Euros just to get the latest and greatest (as in most bloated ) Delphi. Of course Embarcadero will blackmail me, approximately this year, to upgrade now or never be able to upgrade again from BDS 2006 to the newest version of whatever the BDS is called now. Let’s see whether I will resist.

@stanleyxu2005: Hmm, I’d also argue in favor of D, but there are other clean languages as well. All in all it depends on the problem at hand to figure which tools to use. Oh, and of course a little discipline is required during the development. I have to maintain a horrible legacy project written in BCB6, that shows how the easy “RAD-style” can condone bad programming habits, such as sprouting of code that is based on the idea of “forms”, rather than separating that code into classes and have the form own such a class instance or similar …

However, the usability of the tool to be used is of importance. This is something where I have my problem with (Borland/Inprise/Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero)’s solutions since Delphi 7, at latest.

Perhaps, though, those “improvements” which aren’t useful, but instead annoying, to me make a lot of sense to others. And after all (Borland/Inprise/Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero) has introduced Unicode after only a little more than a decade of fully “unicodified” Windows … and of course they had to do it in the “worst possible way(tm)”. For one, there is now only Unicode, instead of the good old choice between ANSI and Unicode.

Perhaps I should just wait a few more decades … or instead continue to use my current tool set and adjust that whenever the need arises.

// Oliver

There is an assumption in the VCL that cost me countless hours of frustration:

function TWinControl.GetDeviceContext(var WindowHandle: HWnd): HDC;
begin
if csDesigning in ComponentState then
Result := GetDCEx(Handle, 0, DCX_CACHE or DCX_CLIPSIBLINGS)
else
Result := GetDC(Handle);
if Result = 0 then raise EOutOfResources.CreateRes(@SWindowDCError);
WindowHandle := FHandle;
end;

I was getting EOutOfResources errors and spent hours fruitlessly trying to figure out where my seemingly very simple code was haemhorraging resources so badly that I was exhausting the system.

I eventually decided that I was being lied to, tracked the exception back to this assumption and determined that the problem was not in fact a lack of resources but simply an invalid window handle.

With that more accurate information, identifying the problem then took a matter of moments!!!

Thanks for nothing VCL!

For more information about such records, you can refer to this:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/Structured_Types