List of IDE features that are cool (when they work)
- Search backwards - Ctrl+F to do a search in your code. F3 to go to the next position Shift+F3 to go to previous position.
- Move/Relocate/Rename project's files directly from Project Manager
- Navigate to recently modified code - Ctrl+Shift+F7 and Ctrl+Shift+F8
- Search for usage - Right click a variable and invoke 'search for usage'. A panel will list all places in current project where that variable is used. In my cases this will make the IDE to freeze.
- UML diagrams (Live Diagrams) - simply doesn't work
- IDE insight (F6) - It could be useful but seems to list a lot of random items.
- CodeSite - a logging system - I couldn't really find it useful
- AQTime - Performance profiler + memory allocation debugger - I couldn't really find it useful
List of functions/units/classes that are cool (when they work)
- SysUtils.GetHomePath - Returns c:\users\username\appdata\roaming.
- IOUtils - Lots of new cool functions. Totally broken.
- SplitString - Example of usage at the end of this document. Unfortunately, the function is VERY slow!
- FindCmdLineSwitch - Example: System.SysUtils.FindCmdLineSwitch('-f', sFileName)
- TThread.ProcessorCount; { Specifies the number of CPU cores in the system }
- TBinaryReader / TBinaryWriter - Nice but only half ass - Interesting but I recommend this library which is much faster: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5639531
- System.Diagnostics.TStopWatch - Can be used to precisely time your code.
- $WeakLinkRTTI - Put these two directives in your DPR file (at the very top) to reduce exe size with 4%:
{$WEAKLINKRTTI ON}{$RTTI EXPLICIT METHODS([]) PROPERTIES([]) FIELDS([])} - TStringBuilder - It was supposed to help you build strings. But it is horrible! Simply don't use it. It is painful slow.
- PtInCircle & PtInRect - Tells you if a point is located in a circle. Could be handy one day.
- TTimeSpan (System unit) is a data structure used for holding information about a period of time. The smallest unit of time is a tick which is 100 nanoseconds. The largest unit of time is a day.
- SLineBreak - global constant that changes its value depending on target platform (Win/Linux/Mac)
- Win32MajorVersion & Win32MinorVersion - To get current Windows version
List of VCL controls that are cool (when they work)
- TJumpList - To list a custom file in a JumpList your program must be registered (in Windows registry) to be able to open that type of file. Another problem is that when the user clicks a 'recent file' in the JumpList, the message is not sent to your app directly. You need to intercept that message.
_________________________________
function CountWords(CONST s: string): Integer; { Might be faster than the one above }
VAR
sArray: TStringDynArray;
begin
sArray:= System.StrUtils.SplitString(s, '.,? =<>*!-:;()/\'+cr+lf);
Result:= Length(sArray);
end;
