Languages, tools, and the craft of writing code that lasts.
12 articles
Newest first
Avalonia is the most flexible UI framework I have used. The same C# and XAML runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, in a browser tab, on a phone, and on a Raspberry Pi with no desktop at all, drawing straight to the framebuffer. What that flexibility looks like in practice, where it comes from, and where it still costs you.
Many Delphi and Lazarus projects are still built on one developer's machine with no tests and no pipeline. This article brings the habits from my day job to Object Pascal: DUnitX and FPCUnit, command-line builds, an Azure Pipelines build, pinned dependencies, and the security basics that come almost for free.
The one rule of desktop threading is that only the main thread touches the user interface. Here is how to follow it in Object Pascal with TThread, Synchronize and Queue, how to stop a thread cleanly, how to share data safely, and where Delphi's parallel library fits in.
A browser-free dashboard for the sensors in my home lab, built with Lazarus directly on a Raspberry Pi. Subscribing to MQTT topics in a background thread, plotting with TAChart, running full-screen as a kiosk, and the practical details of building on ARM.
Desktop tools rarely live alone anymore. This article fetches readings from a REST endpoint with a bearer token and parses the JSON response, first with Delphi's THTTPClient and System.JSON, then with Free Pascal's fphttpclient and fpjson, and shows how an OpenAPI (Swagger) description makes the client code mechanical.
SQLite is the obvious local database for desktop tools. Instead of a vendor data-access layer, this article binds the native sqlite3 library directly from Delphi and Lazarus with one unit that compiles in both, covers deployment and field habits, and adds UnQLite for documents instead of tables.
Coming from C# or Java, manual memory management is the scariest part of Object Pascal. It does not need to be. Five ownership rules, the try..finally pattern, component owners, reference-counted interfaces, and the tools that catch leaks before your users do.
Build a small temperature log viewer in Lazarus, from installing the IDE to a working chart, and then compile the same source on Windows and Linux. Includes the layout, file handling and platform gotchas that catch newcomers.
A tour of modern Object Pascal for people who remember Turbo Pascal from school. Units, records with methods, classes and interfaces, generics and anonymous methods, with notes on where Free Pascal differs from Delphi.
Both Delphi and Lazarus compile the same language, so which one should you learn? I compare licensing, platforms, component libraries, tooling and community, and finish with the questions I ask before choosing one for a project.
When Gunnebo bought BELA this autumn, SafeControl Manager came with it, and it is written in Delphi. Twenty years after my last serious Delphi program I installed Delphi again, and Lazarus the same evening. Here is why Object Pascal still earns a place on my workbench, and a few questions I am still chewing on.
A Delphi service tool from the early 2000s still runs in the field, and when it fails I usually know why within an hour. The reason is madExcept. How I set it up, what a bug report contains, how stack traces get their line numbers, and the compiler directives that make the whole thing work.