CrossTalk FAQ

Does CrossTalk support Visual Controls?

There are no plans to support visual controls. Developers wishing to host visual .NET controls should investigate Hydra. CrossTalk aims to allow native Delphi code to talk to non visual .NET libraries and back ends.

What versions of .NET does CrossTalk support?

Currently .NET supports .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. .NET 3.5 is built on .NET 2.0 and contains additional libraries. In a future release .NET 2.0 will also be supported.

What Delphi versions does CrossTalk support?

CrossTalk supports Delphi 2007 and higher native code compilers. Delphi for .NET is not supported because it is deprecated, but also because CrossTalk is not needed by Delphi for .NET to use .NET libraries.

Does CrossTalk work with C++?

CrossTalk only generates .pas files. However the .pas files can be compiled and used by the C++ personalities in RAD Studio.

Does CrossTalk support Unicode?

In Unicode capable compilers Unicode is supported and always used. In compilers without Unicode support, AnsiString is used. WideStrings are not supported.

Can CrossTalk be used in an ISAPI application?

Currently no, although we hope that in the future this issue can be resolved. IIS enforces many restrictions on DLL initialization that currently causes issues with CrossTalk.

When I run my application an External Exception is raised.

This can occur when any of the following is true:

• The CrossTalk DLLs are not deployed. Please see the deployment section in the documentation.
• .NET 4.0 is not installed.
  

When I run my application it says "CrossTalkMiddle.dll" is missing, but its not.

This message is a bit misleading as it can happen even when CrossTalkMiddle.dll is properly deployed. It is generated by the VCRT loader which CrossTalkMiddle.dll relies on. This is caused when the Visual C++ runtime DLLs are not deployed. Please see the deployment section in the documentation.

Avira is reporting TR/ATRAPS.Gen found in my executable which uses CrossTalk.

In the past a few CrossTalk based projects caused this. CrossTalk is not infected, Avira simply generates a false positive of TR/ATRAPS.Gen. Each time we reported it to Avira and the next update fixed it. Unfortunately Avira's detection system from time to time fails and produces false positives. We saw several in 2010, and one in 2011. We hope Avira will "fix this for good".

You can also report any false positives directly to Avira using this link.

When and how does CrossTalk generate .pas file for the .NET assemblies?

CrossTalk regenerates every .pas file before each Delphi compile. .pas files which are read only will be skipped.

How can I generate CrossTalk .pas files from a command prompt or as part of a build process?

.CTP files are associated with CTClassGen.exe. Simply run CTClassGen.exe with one parameter being the path and file name of the CTP file. When a parameter is passed, the class generator will immediately generate the .pas files.

In addition there is a command line version of the class generator which runs automatically and can be used with build processes.