New LMD 2010 installers are available. New versions of major packs are :

LMD-Tools 10.08
LMD ElPack 8.08
LMD IDE-Tools 3.08

Review changes on history page.

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New LMD 2010 installers are available. New versions of major packs are :

LMD-Tools 10.07
LMD ElPack 8.07
LMD IDE-Tools 3.07

Review changes on history page.

No tags Hide

Best wishes from the LMD Innovative team!

All orders and support issues during holidays will be handled as usual. In the first two weeks of 2010 there might be delays in support handling, because most members of support team will be in holidays.

christmas, congratulation, new year Hide

New LMD 2010 installers are available. New versions of major packs are :

LMD-Tools 10.06
LMD ElPack 8.06
LMD IDE-Tools 3.06

Review changes on history page.

This is mainly a release to work around a problem introduced with recent Delphi 2010 Updates in the shared runtime. The following line:

TLMDOnHeaderWrite = procedure(Sender : TObject; var Target : Text) of object;

causes now a TI894 internal error.

This method signature is used OnHeaderWrite events in TLMDApplication class and TLMDApplicationCtrl control. For Delphi 2010 and above this line is now changed to:

TLMDOnHeaderWrite=procedure(Sender : TObject;const Target: TStringList) of object;

This is a breaking change. If you used this event you need to change your code slightly (add your header lines now to Stringlist instead writing to a TEXT variable.
Please also note that this problem appeared for source code user in Delphi/C++ Builder with Update 2 or higher only. If you are not affected by this problem there is no need to update to .06 release.

[*] Memory leak in LMDVistaDialog.pas was fixed.
[+] Added OldFilter property for TLMDCustomFileDialog.FileTypes, you now be able to set old filters like this Text files (*.txt)|*.TXT
[*] Added default option to enable sizing in dealogs in OSes previous than Vista
[*] TLMDPngObject – fixed drawing on Vista glass

2010, Announce, installers, update Hide

The latest OS release from Microsoft introduces to us a lot of new features that (can) make life of developers easier and improve usability of own applications. This post is about small part of new Windows API that allows to customize taskbar button of your application.
(more…)

api, taskbar, windows 7 Hide

New LMD 2010 installers are available. New versions of major packs are :

LMD-Tools 10.05
LMD ElPack 8.05
LMD IDE-Tools 3.05

Besides that several standalone packs and the Freeware SE packages were updated as well.

Both public and protected download areas were updated with new installers.
Review changes on history page. LMD 2010 platform changes can be reviewed in public Wiki. A comparison of all LMD packages packages can be reviewed in the feature matrix.

2010, Announce, installers, update Hide

Several Windows font names start with “@” in their names, but what does that mean exactly? I think this is not of interest for me only – I just had a related support question from a customer. After googling 20 minutes I finally found the answer on MSDN (article “Vertical Writing and Printing“, which is no longer available, though):

As the following illustration shows, displaying text vertically doesn’t mean that you simply rotate an entire line of text by 90 degrees. Most characters remain upright, but others, such as those identified by arrows, change orientation.

Fortunately, with Win32 you don’t need to write code to rotate characters. To display text vertically on Windows, enumerate the available fonts as usual and select a font whose typeface name begins with the at (@) character. Then create a LOGFONT structure, setting both the escapement and the orientation to 270 degrees. Calls to TextOut are the same as for horizontal text.

The Far East Win32 SDK contains a sample application called TATE (short for tategaki, meaning “vertical writing”) which demonstrates how to create fonts and display vertical text. Figure 7-22 shows a sample file displayed in TATE using a horizontal font. Selecting a vertical font from the Font dialog box (see Figure 7-23 below) causes the text to be displayed vertically. (See Figure 7-24 below.)

As a result all LMD controls like TLMDFontComboBox, which allow to display or select a font, support now an option to hide such font names when they are of no or little use for your end customers.

fonts, misc Hide

New LMD 2010 installers are available. New versions of major packs are :

LMD-Tools 10.04
LMD ElPack 8.04
LMD IDE-Tools 3.04

Besides that several standalone packs were updated as well.
Please note the updated executable demo projects:

• LMD Grid Demo
• Office Theme Renderer Demo
• IDE-Tools 3 Demo.

Both public and protected download areas were updated with new installers.
Review changes on history page. LMD 2010 platform changes can be reviewed in public Wiki.

2010, installers, update Hide

Once again, many thanks to Roddy Pratt for the subject of this post.
The OnUserRule event serves to check if entered symbol is correct for a given place when MaskType = meMask and there is an “r” letter in the mask. For example, if Mask = ‘rr’, following OnUserRule handler allows to enter “aa”, “ab”, “ba”, “bb” strings only:

procedure TForm1.LMDMaskEdit1UserRule(Sender: TObject; var Ok: Boolean;
   c: WideChar; at: Integer);
begin
  ok := ( c = 'a' ) or ( c = 'b' );
end;

While implementing some kind of tricky user rule, it is very easy to yield to temptation of changing text with OnUserRule event.
This is what should never be done unless you have some free hours to debug unexpected behavior of your construction.

(more…)

edit controls, lmdtools Hide

Besides using the spin buttons and the arrow/ PgUp/PgDown keys, TLMDSpinEdit allows to enter values directly into the text field. By now this control handled a hard-coded validation on each entered character, because pressing digit keys caused changed values in the SetDouble method.

This behavior was OK when min value of control is zero or negative. But for min values greater than zero some interesting thing occurred which looked like a bug. Example: Setting MinValue = 5 it was impossible to enter values starting with 1, 2, 3, 4 digits directly (as described by Roddy Pratt’s post in LMD-Tools newsgroup from 8/10/2009).
There was always a workaround: After entering e.g. ‘55′ place cursor before first digit, and then press 1. Result is ‘15′. Alternatively, one could use PgUp key to change the value from 5 to 15, and then use arrow keys. We have to admit that this may not be comprehensible for the end user.

The problem is immanent to the per-symbol validation which is implemented by TLMDSpinEdit controls. How should we (as programmer) know that the end user is going to add a second character after entering ‘1′?
We implemented an alternative mechanism to check end user entries: The property CheckOnExitOnly was introduced, which allows you to decide how and when validation checks should be performed. If set to false, per-symbol validation is enabled control behaves like before. If enabled, control checks value range only when control is loosing focus.

edit controls, lmdtools Hide