Power Debugging - Sun, 9 Nov 2008

The upgrade to the new Delphi-2009 compatible ElPack did not come without its share of pain. A few essential features of Behold were not working.

First, my development version of Behold could not read the .bho files that were created by earlier versions. That was because those Behold files were written with 4-byte ASCII text and not 8-byte Unicode text. I had to trace this back to the ElIni routine of ElPack and determine the fix, which ultimately wasn’t difficult and only a few lines of code. But it took 8 hours.

Second, the recently used files list was not appearing or had bad entries in it. This traced back to an improper implementation of a certain type of Registry entry that ElIni was using. A few more lines of code and this was fixed … 6 more hours later.

I’ve reported both of these problems to the LMD ElPack newsgroup, so that they’ll hopefully include fixes in future updates so that I won’t have to custom change it each time.

Just a few more problems are left to get rid of the last glitches from the upgrade to Unicode.