Merlin's Delphi Forge

Borland Delphi 7 Easter Egg

1. Put a shortcut to Delphi7 in your Start Menu called Delphi7. (So you can click Start|Programs|Delphi7)
2. Right click this shortcut, properties, set the Shortcut key to CTRL + SHIFT + 7, click OK.
3. Click Start, press escape, then hold Ctrl+Shift, press and release 7.
4. You should see a picture of the development team (I assume that’s who they are). I have found that it does not always come up, though.

Borland Delphi 7 Easter Egg Team Picture

Borland Delphi 6 Easter Egg

• In the About screen hold down Alt and type one of the following: “team”, “jedi”, or “quality”.

Borland Delphi 5 Easter Egg

1. Make a text file, either in the IDE with File | New… | Text, or using Notepad, or Windows Explorer.
2. Save the text file with a .Allen extension, as opposed to a .Txt extension.
3. Start a new project in Delphi 5 and open the project manager (View | Project Manager or Ctrl+Alt+F11).
4. Right-click on the project, choose Add… and use the Files of type: combobox to show Any file (*.*).
5. Choose the .Allen file and press Open to add it to the project.
6. At this point, right-clicking on the text file will give you a menu including the entry Meet Allen Bauer.
7. Choosing this menu item firstly displays a message box saying: Hi I’m Allen
8. Your Web Browser is then launched to display the URL http://www.on24.com/corporatevideo/borland/3-5_56.html.

This is a Web page showing a video of Allen talking about some of the new features in C++Builder 4.

If you now compile the project (Ctrl+F9), the compiler will produce some additional credits to the IDE developers.

A side effect of the compilation (assuming the project had been saved) is to also produce another empty text file with the same name, but with a .Allen.Bauer extension.

To add a context menu item to Windows Explorer you have create a few entries in the system Registry. First you have to get the file type’s name, add the context menu item and add then the command line. Besides files you can add context menus to drives or folders.<br>
Special extensions:<br>
- <i>.drive</i> – drives.<br>
- <i>.folder</i> – folders.
<pre>
<b>uses</b>
Registry;
…
<b> </b>var
sTypeName: <b>string</b>;
<b>begin
with</b> TRegistry.Create <b>do
try</b>
RootKey := HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT;
<i>{ Set the extension you want. Include the ‘.’ character }</i>
OpenKey(‘.Extension’, True);
<i>{ Get file type name }</i>
sTypeName := ReadString(”);
CloseKey;

<i>(* Create explorer extension.
*
* Instead of ‘Open’ put whatever you want.
*)</i>
OpenKey(” + sTypeName + ‘ShellOpen’, True);
<i>{ The context menu item }</i>
WriteString(”, ‘Open in my application’);
CloseKey;

OpenKey(” + sTypeName + ‘ShellOpenCommand’, True);
<i>(* The commandline. Enter all the commandline options you need.
* Remember to use quotes for long file names with spaces. Even if your
* application’s filename doesn’t contain any spaces the folder that
* it’s in may contain them.
*
* %1 – is the selected file’s name.
*)</i>
WriteString(”, ‘”‘ + Application.ExeName + ‘” “%1″‘);
CloseKey;

<i>(* Repeat this for every file type you want to add a context menu to.
* For this operation you may want to use a for loop and a constat
* string array with the file extensions.
*)</i>
<b>finally</b>
Free;
<b>end</b>;
<b>end</b>;
</pre>