How to compile Delphi without license in CI build server

In this post I will walk you through the activities required to build Delphi on build servers without the need for a costly code-gear license on all build servers. One of a typical reason why Delphi is still used is because of the cost involved in converting those code base to a newer technology. This is not the topic of discussion here, but we will look at how the code base can be maintained and can be integrated into the Continuous Integration (CI) system that we have. As you know, CI system today runs on cluster and when it comes to build, we must keep the cost under control by opting for the opensource version of dependent tools or by using methods where we need only limited license or no license at all. Here we will see how to build Delphi in the build server with no license requirement for Code Gear. The environment that I am using is Bamboo and powershell.

How to build without license

Introduction

At times we may have to find some space in the machine where we can store some data. We cannot guess the drive as it may be different on different machine. With powershell we can find the drive to where the OS is mounted and can try to store the data there. The below line of code will help you achieve this using powershell.

A recent encounter in windows server where a need for a folder alias was unavoidable, we made a discovery that unlike linux, folder alias is hard to achieve in windows command for windows version less than windows 10. Though it is achievable, it is hard to achieve when the target directory path is dynamic. This lead to a search for the alternative to deploy in this scenario. The scenario was when we have to use the editbin.exe and its LARGEADDRESSAWARE where we discovered that LARGEADDRESSAWARE take only a particular character length for the input file and if there are more then it will trim it. This was leading to an error.

Introduction

This post is about implementing a web-job in azure which will restart a service on a predefined interval. When restarting a service on a predefined interval clearly says that there is some problem with the implementation, we may rely on this as an emergency measure until we tackle the problem. Here we will ignore the implication behind it but will focus on how to get this done. To get this done, we need an application in AD which has the required permission to restart the service. The components which are required in this process are as mentioned below. Even when scripts are available to create application for you, it is good to go via the portal way to make sure that we do what we understood.

Logging is one of the very important factor in any application. You require it to analyse what when and how things went wrong. It serves as the log of the application. But when you have multiple instance of the same application running in parallel, then you don’t have the purpose served properly by the logging mechanism as it will be writing all the log entry into the same file and the log will be cluttered. Here in this post we will discuss how to handle this typical situation when you have multiple instances running at the same time and log4net writes all the logs into the same file.