Building Delphi project from Visual Studio Code - visual-studio-code

I have already set up build and debug environment for Object Pascal inside Visual Studio Code via FPC and GDB, but I just made build process work for programs containing only 1 .pas file via
"command": "fpc",
"args": [ "-g", "-Px86_64", "helloWorld.pas" ],
Now, I need to build quite big Delphi project group (something like solution?) and it contains main project file .groupproj.
Is there a way to build the .groupproj via FPC somehow?
Or at least some workaround like conversion to .lpi and then build via FPC?
Or at least call Delphi compiler/builder from VS Code and build the whole project group via it? (but I don't like this option, because I prefer to not use Delphi)

To get some facts straight for other people that might stumble on this:
FPC supports Delphi source files (.lpr/.dpr, .pp/.pas and .inc). Not Delphi meta information (.dproj/.dof/.bpg/.cfg/.groupproj) which is Delphi version dependent anyway.
Lazarus conversion tool also converts .dfms. Basically it is a .dfm cleaner and Uses clause enhancer, just like some conversion tools between Delphi versions. It by default however also does substitutions that change Delphi code (that works in FPC's Delphi (-Sd) mode) into the objfpc dialect (-S2 mode) preferred by Lazarus . Always make a backup before trying, and check the configuration of the conversion tool thoroughly.
FPC and Delphi commandline parameters are different.
FPC does not support Lazarus metadata formats like .lpi. The Lazarus utility Lazbuild however does support building Lazarus projects from the commandline.
But luckily the basics are the same
a main program or library file files)
a set of unit (.pas files) and include directories (.inc files). FPC differentiates between the two, delphi doesn't.
autocreated forms must be added to the project.
any additional commandline switches like defines to set, range checking optimization options.
So in worst case, examine the Delphi projects (either in IDE or texteditor) for directories and switches and create either a manual buildscript or a lazarus (.lpi) project.
However it is vital to keep in mind that the default FPC mode is NOT Delphi mode, so always when executing FPC make sure you manually enable Delphi mode (-Sd)
Group project support within Lazarus is very new (as in months), and afaik not even in stable versions yet. Though if you create a bunch of .lpis, a batch file/shellscript with a sequence of lazbuild commands on .lpis might do it.
P.s. throw the VSCode under the bus and use Lazarus.

Related

Eclipse Xtext and an independent LSP server do not (appear to) work together - should they?

I have an independently written LSP-compliant language server for a custom language and an Xtext framework for that language, as Eclipse plugins. The two work fine independently; the LSP is connected in using LSP4E.
But when I try to connect the Language Server into a project in which Xtext is providing syntax coloring and some parsing checking, it appears that the language server is never started and certainly is not providing the error messages to the Eclipse UI that it does when used by itself. I'm not asking Xtext to create a language server itself.
The goal is to use (and not reimplement) the LS for parsing and type checking and language-aware code navigation, while using Xtext for syntax coloring.
Can anyone point me to a successful use of these two technologies together? or know that they cannot (yet?) be?
Edit: To the comment about checking whether the LS is working. As far as I can tell, the LS is not even started, though it started fine when used alone. Somehow putting Xtexxt into the mix has usurped the connection to the LS or changed it in a way that the launching and use no longer happens.
The LSP4J version installed is (only) Eclipse LSP4J org.eclipse.lsp4j 0.15.0.v20220805-0131 org.eclipse.lsp4j
Xtext's components vary, but basically Eclipse Xtext Xtext 2.28.0.v20220829-0438 org.eclipse.xtext

Where are the files defining NVIC for STM32 in PlatformIO when using CubeMX?

I've recently switched to using PlatformIO for developing for STM32 using the following workflow:
Create a .ioc file using the CubeMX utility
Generate source code and the PlatformIO configuration from that .ioc file from the stm32pio command line utility
Edit, build, and debug using the PlatformIO plug-in for VSCode (Mac)
Overall, this works very well. However, I was previously using the CubeMX code generation in ST's CubeMX IDE, which placed a .s file in the source directory that (as I understand it) defined the NVIC, as well as the default function that was used for exceptions/interrupts that are not explicitly defined (i.e., those handled by their default weak implementations.) I don't see where this is defined in the new workflow. Is this generated dynamically as part of the build process?
The reason I'm asking is (beside wanting a better understanding of the process overall), I'd like to write an interrupt handler for EXTI0, but trigger it as a software interrupt, and not assign a pin to it. If that is not possible, then perhaps the entire point is moot.
I was able to find the answer. These steps might be useful to somebody else who comes across this question. This was done on MacOS, but should be similar to the process for other operating systems.
During the build process, the filename can be seen. It will be prefaced with startup_, followed by the name of the particular chip you're developing for. In my case, the line is
Compiling .pio/build/disco_f072rb/FrameworkCMSISDevice/gcc/startup_stm32f072xb.o
Searching in the .platformio folder of my user directory, I found the matching .s file, which in my case was .platformio/packages/framework-stm32cube/f0/Drivers/CMSIS/Device/ST/STM32F0xx/Source/Templates/gcc/startup_stm32f072xb.s
The structure of the path leading to the file indicates the particulars of the hardware and frameworks I'm using: STM32Cube framework, a F0 series chip, and the GCC compiler. The easiest way to find this file, and how I was able to find it, is using the find command from the terminal to search the PlatformIO directory.
Reading this file gives the lines I was looking for, defining the names of the functions to be used for exception and interrupt handling, such as the following:
.weak EXTI0_1_IRQHandler
.thumb_set EXTI0_1_IRQHandler,Default_Handler
It seems like, while I am using the CubeMX HAL for some drivers, the basic startup code is done using CMSIS, so it should be the same for HAL, LL, or CMSIS based builds.

How to reference a specific DLL for functionality in said DLL

Good day,
I have an application that I developed that transfers files between two machines ("site" and "server"). This application was set to target dotNet 3.5. Furthermore, I am using Renci.SshNet to handle the connections between the machines and the transferring of said files.
The issue that I am facing currently though is that about 70% of the "site" machines do not have a standard dotNet and is also quite old; thus these machines do not support all the required functionality as the external dll makes calls to System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitOne() and System.Threading.WaitHandle.WaitAny(WaitHandle[], Int32) and other overloads of these methods.
The workaround that I have for this though is to install netfx20SP2 or netfx30SP1, yet I am not in the position to perform this update on all machines as they are scattered across the country and have data limitations (bandwidth and cap).
What I want to do possibly is to embed the System.Threading dll that I have downloaded and then the application should use those classes instead, or alternatively just point the application to use the said dll.
Is this at all possible, or do you have to load the dll into the GAC? And also, will it be possible to "run" this higher version of System.Threading in the application while the system itself is on a lower framework version. Something is telling me that the best bet will be to actually run the service pack installation to avoid unnecessary coding but I'm not sure exactly how to approach this.
Thank you in advance for any assistance / suggestions,
JD
To allow the execution of an application that, let's say, targets .Net 4; while the machine itself only has let's say, .Net 3.5, installed, one can redirect Windows to check the local (executing) directory for dlls that should contain the required symbols loaded into memory instead of the default symbols that get loaded upon execution (the default would be the NetFx installed on the machine - which I believe the highest version of the framework that can be found upon loading when the execution starts or would be the highest available version that is lower or equal to the targeted framework).
This file's contents (myApp.exe.local) are ignored. It is just there to tell Windows to
look in that folder for the applicable symbols and if not found, the system will roll back to attempt to load these symbols from the NetFx directory.
Read more at Microsoft Dev Center - Docs (link is attached to the following paragraph which is a Copy-Paste of a section of this document).
To use DLL redirection, create a redirection file for your application. The redirection file must be named as follows: App_name.local. For example, if the application name is Editor.exe, the redirection file should be named Editor.exe.local. You must install the .local file in the application directory. You must also install the DLLs in the application directory.

A good development environment setup for Web2Py

Have been trying out Web2Py for a couple of days now and I decided it to be a keeper. But there is one thing that concerns me a lot and that might be a showstopper in the end. I need a nice development environment & setup I can trust and be productive with. Coming from the MS Visual Studio world I'm looking for something with good autocomplete / intellisense + functions for versioning and deployment.
I did some attempts to edit my code in Eclipse but it needs additional setup to run with autocomplete, and for debugging I dont know if it's possible. (Noticed there was a Django project template in Eclipse which is a bit tempting I must say.)
Wing Ide has a instruction on how to get web2py up and running and I am up to testing that one. Not free, but very cheap compared to much in the Windows world.
I also want a good versioning (hg) setup, and preferably a semi-automatic FTP-deployment-method.
What IDE do Web2Py developers use, and how do your setup look like?
A complete setup script for a project in a good IDE would be awesome! (Just like the installation is, one click to get it running 100%).
Pycharm looks good, perhaps that one can add web2py support http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/PY-1648
Thanks a lot!
OS: Windows 7/Windows XP
IDE: NetBeans
Version control: TortoiseHg/NetBeans
Debugger: winpdb
Shell: IPython
Publish: WinSCP/PuTTY/TortoiseHg
Scripts
Once I create a new project in web2py I add a few scripts to my main app folder:
web2py\applications\myapp\DebugWinpdb.bat:
C:\Python25\Scripts\winpdb.bat ..\..\web2py.py -i 127.0.0.1 -p8000 -mypassword
web2py\applications\myapp\DebugShell.bat:
C:\Python25\Scripts\winpdb.bat ..\..\web2py.py -S myapp -M
web2py\applications\myapp\Shell.bat:
python ..\..\web2py.py -S myapp -M
IDE
As others have stated you need to do some extra stuff to get autocomplete/intellisense for web2py no matter what IDE you use.
For me NetBeans was a good compromise between does-everything-if-only-you-can-figure-out-how (Eclipse/PyDev) and does-the-basics-but-few-extras (PyScripter).
NetBeans Setup (Project Properties):
Python Category
Python Platform: Python 2.x (default is Jython)
Run Category
Main Module: web2py.py
Application Arguments: -i 127.0.0.1 -p 8000 -a mypassword
NetBeans Pros:
Tight Mercurial integration
Highlights which lines have been added, changed, or deleted in your source file as you edit it
Selective rollback of individual changes you've made since your last commit
One of the nicest visual diff viewers I have used
Python PEP8 style hints (fully customizable)
Name "foo" is not a valid class name according to your code style (CapitalizedWords)
Name "Bar" is not a valid function name according to your code style (lowercase_with_underscores)
Auto-format hotkey (corrects spacing around operators, etc)
Navigation within source file
semantically indexes current source file
organizes alphabetically by type (Class, method, attribute, etc)
makes even enormous style sheets manageable
NetBeans Cons:
Integrated Debugger doesn't work with web2py (that one really hurts)
Long startup time (but acceptably snappy for me once up and running)
Version Control
I use and highly recommend Mercurial for source control. As mentioned earlier, NetBeans has great support for Mercurial but there are some things I'd just rather do in TortoiseHg.
TortoiseHg Pros:
Shell overlay icons
Repository Explorer
view repos history with graphical display of branching/merging
one stop shop for Incoming, Outgoing, Push, Pull, Update, etc with button for Commit tool
Commit tool
Hunk Selection: cherry pick changes from within a file for more focused Commits
Add, Remove, Diff, Revert, Move, Remove, Forget
TortoiseHg Cons:
No easy way to drop directly into a command line
Bug that regularly prevents files from being removed during commit (waits indef for a lock to be released; running hg addremove from command line is a reliable workaround)
Publishing
I use a combination of WinSCP (for browsing), PuTTY (for terminal commands), and TortoiseHg (for push/pull of my repos) to work with my shared hosting account on Webfaction.
The first thing I do is set up public/private key encryption. If you are having trouble getting this set up between Windows and Linux, try these instructions from Andre Molnar. Short story is you need to generate your private key using ssh-keygen on Linux, copy it down to your Windows machine using WinSCP, then convert it for use with WinSCP and PuTTY.
Then add the following lines to your global mercurial.ini file:
[ui]
ssh = "C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\TortoisePlink.exe" -ssh -2 -i "c:\path\to\your\privatekey.ppk"
Even if you have to connect to multiple servers, you need only copy your public key to each of the different servers. You'll also want to let WinSCP and PuTTY know where your private key is located, but those are fairly easy to figure out.
Try the new web2py admin interface in trunk. It has a web based mercurial interface and a google deploy interface.
In web2py you can edit applications/admin/models/0.py and set
TEXT_EDITOR = 'amy'
And you will get the web based Amy editor with autocompletion. It is not default because because it does not work with some browsers and because autocompletion is not as good as eclipse. It may work for you.
You can use web2py with Eclipse but you need a minor workaround to let Eclipse know about the web2py environment. It is explained here.
I know other users have used other IDEs with web2py, for example WinIDE and pyCharm. I suggest you ask on the web2py mailing list where people are very helpful.
I'm pretty sure that the 'one-click setup script' to do all that you are looking for does not exist (at the moment). But don't be put off - you can achieve a nice development environment to suit your needs and there are lots of choices.
Although I develop on Windows, I like the setup I have as it's more of a 'Unixy' way of thinking whereby I have a number of tools each doing a specific task. Once you get a workflow setup you can be very productive - although I realise it may look a bit confusing initially coming from a Visual Studio world.
Below I outline what I've settled on. I'm sure others will have their own recommendations. Pick the options you like best.
(There should be hyperlinks to useful software below but I don't have enough reputation to include more than 1 link...)
For developing on Windows I'm enjoying using Pyscripter. It's free, fast (compared to Aptana / Eclipse / Netbeans etc) and has some nice features (dark theme, integrated python console and code explorer to name a few).
To get code completion / intellisense to work for web2py you need to add some code to your model / controller files because of the way web2py works. There are some instructions in this discussion topic on the web2py group.
web2py has a great error ticketing system built in (see the web2py book chapter 3). For more comprehensive debugging, pydb seems to be the way to go. Just put the code below as a breakpoint:
import pydb
pydb.debugger()
and it'll take you to the debugger.
I use TortoiseHg for Mercurial integration and it works wonderfully. Combine that with winscp and you can deploy easily.
Caveats: I work in OS X, and do most of my coding in BBEdit.
That said, I've used both Wing and Komodo IDE for web2py debugging, and they've both worked quite well for me. I haven't tried NetBeans in a while now; when I did the Python support seemed a little rough around the edges. And I've never had the time or patience to come up to speed with Eclipse; it's filed in my mental file cabinet with Emacs, no doubt unjustly to Eclipse and/or Emacs.
(And I'll echo mdipierro's recommendation to try the web2py mailing list; it's really indispensable--one of web2py's strongest points.)
Have you considered using fewer tools? Both Python and web2py don't require a whole lot of code to get a lot accomplished. web2py only adds 10 or 15 new function calls (besides the HTML helpers and validators). You might find that Eclipse and other IDEs actually get in the way. Setting up new apps in web2py is simple through the admin system. Since the new app scaffolding copies the welcome app, you can customize new app setup by editing the welcome app. With Mercurial (or Git, Subversion or Bazaar) you can set up a server on your machine or with one of the public sites and either push or pull updates to your production server. Keep it simple, I say.
we are using web2py framework for all our web application needs and this is our setup :
OS - Ubuntu up-to-date
IDE - Aptana Studio 3.0 with pyDev
Version Control - git
Python 2.7
Browser for developing phase : Chrome
I've found the Wing IDE debugger to be very useful. It's a powerful debugger across the board, and also can be configured to do remote debugging, which is really important when you are running web2py on a no-GUI remote machine (e.g. at Amazon Web Services).

Storing third-party framework/middleware into source control that needs to alter your compiler/IDE

I know there are posts that ask how one stores third-party libraries into source control (such as this and this). While those are great answers, I still can't find the answer to this:
How do you store third-party middleware/frameworks binaries that need to alter your compiler / IDE for the library to work properly? Note: for my needs, I don't need to store the middleware source, I only store header files / lib / JAR ..so that it's ready to be linked.
Typically, you simply link libraries to your app, and you are good. But what about middleware / frameworks that need more?
Specific examples:
Qt moc pre-processor.
ZeroC Ice Slice (ice) compiler (similar to CORBA IDL preprocessor).
Basically these frameworks/middleware need to generate their own code before your application can link to it.
From the point of view of the developer, ideally he wants to just checkout, and everything should be ready to go. But then my IDE/compiler will not be setup properly yet, so the compilation will fail..
What do you think?
Backup everything including the setup of the IDE, operating system, etc. This is what i do
1) Store all 3rd party libraries in source control. I have a branch for all the libraries.
2) Backup the entire tool chain which was used to build. This includes every tool. Each tool is installed into the same directory on each developers computer, so this makes it simple to setup a developers machine remotely.
3) This is the most hardcore, but prepare 1 perfect developer IDE setup which is clean, then make a VMWare / VirtualPC image out of it. This will be useful when you cant seem to get the installers to work in future.
I learned this lesson the painful way because I often have to wade through visual studio 6 code which don't build properly.
I think that a better solution is to make sure that the build is self-contained and downloads all necessary software for itself unless you tell it otherwise. This is the way maven works, and it is really handy. The downside is that it sometimes needs to download a application server or similar, which is highly unpractical, but at least the build succeeds and it becomes the new developers responsibility to improve the build if needed.
This does of course not work great if your software needs attended installs, but I would try to avoid any such dependencies in any case. You can add alternative routes (e.g the ant script compiles the code if eclipse hasn't done it yet). If this is not feasible, an alternative option is to fail with a clear indication of what went wrong (e.g 'CORBA_COMPILER_HOME' not set, please set and try again').
All that said, the most complete solution is of course to ship everything with your app (i.e OS, IDE, the works), but I doubt that that is applicable in the general case, how would you feel about that type of requirements to build a software product? It also limits people who want to adapt your software to new platforms.
What about adding 1 step.
A nant script which is started with a bat file. The developer would only have to execute one .bat file, the bat file could start nant, and the Nant script could be made to do anything you need.
This is actually a pretty subtle question. You're talking about how to manage features of the environment which are necessary in order to allow your build to proceed. In this case it's the top level of your code toolchain, but the problem can be generalised to include the entire toolchain, and even key aspects of the operating system.
In my place of work, we have various requirements of the underlying operating system before our code will successfully run. This includes machine-specific configurations as well as ensuring correct versions of system libraries and language runtimes are present. We've dealt with this by maintaining a standard generic build machine image which contains the toolchain requirements we need. We can push this out to a virgin machine and get a basic environment that contains the complete toolchain and any auxiliary programs.
We then use fsvs to version control any additional configuration, which can be layered on to specific groups of machines as needed.
Finally, we use custom scripts hooked in to our CI server (we use Hudson) to perform any pre-processing steps required for specific projects.
The main advantages for us of this approach is:
We can build and deploy developer and production machines very easily (and have IT handle this side of the problem).
We can easily replace failed machines.
We have a known environment for testing (we install everything to a simulated 'production server' before going live).
We (the software team) version control critical configuration details and any explicit pre-processing steps.
I would outsource the task of building the midleware to a specialized build server and only include the binary output as regular 3rd party dependencies under source control.
If this strategy can be successfully applied depends on whether all developers need to be able to change midleware code and recompile it frequently. But this issue could also be solved via a Continous Integration Server like Teamcity that allows to create private builds.
Your build process would look like the following:
Middleware repo containing middleware code
Build server, building middleware
Push middleware build output to project repository as 3rd party references
Update: This doesn't really answer how to modify the IDE. It's just a sort-of Maven replacement thingy for C++/Python/Java. You shouldn't need to modify the IDE to build stuff, if so, you need a different IDE or a system that generates/modifies IDE files for you. (See CMake for a cross-platform c/c++ project file generator.)
I've written a system (first in Ant/Beanshell at two different places, then rewrote it in Python at my current job) where third-partys are compiled separately (by someone), stored and shared via HTTP.
Somewhat hurried description follows:
Upon start, the build system looks through all modules in repo, executes each module's setup target, which downloads the specific version of a third-party lib or app that the current code revision uses. These are then unzipped, PATH/INCLUDE etc are added to (or, for small libs, copy them to a single directory for the current repo) and then launches Visual Studio with /useenv.
Each module's file check for stuff that it needs, and if it needs installing and licensing, such as Visual Studio, Matlab or Maya, that must be on the local computer. If that's not there, the cmd-file will fail with a nice error message. This way, you can also check that the correct version is in there
So there are a number of directories on the local disk involved. %work% needs to be set using an global environment variable, preferrable on a different disk than system or source-checkout, at least if doing heavy C++.
%work% <- local store for all temp files, unzip, and for each working copy's temp files
%work%/_cache <- downloaded zips (2 gb)
%work%/_local <- local zips (for development or retrieved in other manners while travvelling)
%work%/_unzip <- unzips of files in _cache (10 gb)
%work%&_content <- textures/3d models and other big files (syncronized manually, this is 5 gb today, not suitable for VC either)
%work%/D_trunk/ <- store for working copy checked out to d:/trunk
%work%/E_branches/v2 <- store for working copy checked out to e:/branches/v2
So, if trunk uses Boost 1.37 and branches/v2 uses 1.39, both boost-1.39 and boost-1.37 reside in /_cache/ (as zips) and /_unzip/ (as raw files).
When starting visual studio using bat files from d:/trunk/BuildSystem/Visual Studio.cmd, INCLUDE points to /_unzip/boost-1.37, while if runnig e:/branches/v2/BuildSystem/Visual Studio.cmd, INCLUDE points to /_unzip/boost-1.39.
In the repo, only a small set of bootstrap binaries need to be stored (i.e. wget and 7z).
We currently download about 2 gb of packed data, which is unzipped to 10 gb (pdb files are huge!), so keeping this out of source control is essential. Having this system allows us to keep the repo size small enough to use DVCS such as Mercurial (or Git) instead of SVN, which is very nice. (I'm thinking of using Mercurials bigfiles extension or file sharing instead of a separately http-served directory.)
It work flawlessly. Developers need only to check out, set an enviroment variable for their local cache, then run Visual Studio via a specific batch-file in the repo. No unzipping or compiling or stuff. A new developer can set up his computer in no time. (Installing Visual Studio takes the order of a magnitude more time.)
First time on a new computer takes some time, but then it's fast, only a few seconds. Downloads/unzips are shared on the local computer, do checking out additional branches/versions does not occupy more space. Working offline is also possible, you just need to get the zip files manually if new ones have been uploaded. (This mechanism is essential to test new versions/compilations of third-party libraries.)
The basics are in a repo on bitbucket but it needs more work before it's ready for the public. Apart from doc and polish, I plan to:
extend it to use cmake instead of raw
vcproj-files, to make it more
cross-platform.
script the entire
process from checkout/download of
third-party packages to building and
zipping them (including storing the
download in a local repo) ... currently that's on my dev computer. Not good. Will fix. :)
As for moc, we use Qt's Visual Studio add-in, which stores this in the .vcproj files. Works well. I do think that CMake is one of the best answers for this though