Delphi 2009
- From: Erick Engelke <erick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:13:35 -0400
I upgraded to Delphi 2009 today, and I thought some potential CodeGear customers might like an opinion of someone with a lot of code.
My first job to tackle was to convert a big existing project which I had coded in Delphi 7.
My project had GUI elements, various system parts like talking to device drivers, communicating over pipes, creating DLLs, etc. The code is 10,000 lines, and that's compact compared what it would be in C - all thanks to Delphi's classes.
I needed 2009 because I needed unicode support for things like TStringLists. Anyone who thinks they don't need unicode is missing big parts of the market.
Initially I installed 2009 on an XP VM in Virtual PC. That failed miserably because MS's .Net package wouldn't install (despite it being a MS OS in an MS virtual machine... piece of crap).
So then I installed it on a Server 2008 computer. It installed easily, and took a reasonable 30 minutes to install about 1 GB. I didn't have any media, it all came down over the Internet. Media costs $25 extra if you don't have broadband.
Conversion was wonderful. I spent only about 10 minutes patching the 10,000 lines of code!!!! The only things that needed fixing were where the client and server programs communicated strings over a named pipe - they just had to be touched up to realize strings were in unicode - which is what I wanted anyways. Other than that, all the stringlists, string manipulation routines and everything just worked automatically. I was very impressed.
The compiler is very quick - definately faster than the last few releases.
The help system is regaining much of the functionality it had in Delphi 7 but lost in subsequent versions. They have put some example code back in, thanks.
New stuff is cool, but my focus today was worrying about the scads of programs I already support. I think, if your programs were written well, the beauty of Pascal's string types will make conversion pretty easy.
The project config files are XML. I had to make a small change to the file output subdirectory and I couldn't find it on the menus. So I editted the XML in the mean time. I consider it good form to use XML (or at least text) whenever possible, so I was pleased they had done that.
The only thing I don't like is something that's been around for the last few versions, that the Tool Palette is vertical rather than horizontal. I wish that were customizable.
Erick
Erick Engelke erick@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Manager of Networks and Systems Integration PHY-3013
Engineering Computing (519) 885-1211 x35893
University of Waterloo http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~erick
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