Question about Delphi 2009 vs Delphi 7

Hi,
  I was wondering if any of you can point me to a URLs that show the most 
important improvements between these versions of Delphi.
The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 (for 
which we have licenses).

Fire at will!

-- 
Saluti,
  Alessandro Federici

-------------------------------
"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually 
happened." (Mark Twain)

Alessandro Federici wrote:
> Hi,
>   I was wondering if any of you can point me to a URLs that show the most 
> important improvements between these versions of Delphi.
> The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 (for 
> which we have licenses).

http://dn.codegear.com/article/39076

Alessandro Federici wrote:

> Hi,
> I was wondering if any of you can point me to a URLs that show the
> most important improvements between these versions of Delphi.  The
> objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to
> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7
> (for which we have licenses).
> 
> Fire at will!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/305016/what-are-major-incentives-to-upgrade-to-d2009-unicode-excluded#305262

-- 
Regards,
Bruce McGee
Glooscap Software

Alessandro Federici wrote:

> Fire at will!

What kind of applications are you writing?  Win32 client apps,
services, websnap?

-- 
Iman

"Alessandro Federici" <none@none.com> wrote in message 
news:51961@forums.codegear.com...

> The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 (for 
> which we have licenses).

What are you moving from?

Alessandro Federici wrote:


> Fire at will!

http://dn.codegear.com/article/34324 -- needs to be updated for
generics and anonymous methods

http://dn.codegear.com/article/34323 -- add Build Configurations, Class
explorer, Windows RES/RC handling.

http://dn.codegear.com/article/34325 -- same -- doesn't have Ribbon
controls in there.

-- 
Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager - Embarcadero
http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges

I appreciate the idea that D7 is a mature product and is very
compatible with FPC/Lazarus. If I were your powers-that-pay-the-bills I
wouldn't throw any money for some new syntactic sugar of dubious
utility and a not too reliable compiler. :)

Alicia Kensington wrote:
> I appreciate the idea that D7 is a mature product and is very
> compatible with FPC/Lazarus. If I were your powers-that-pay-the-bills I
> wouldn't throw any money for some new syntactic sugar of dubious
> utility and a not too reliable compiler. :)
I've used Delphi 7 for around 6 years, and I can say without a doubt 
that Delphi 2009 has a better IDE, and the new language features is more 
than worth the upgrade.  The resulting code is faster.   And perhaps 
it's just my imagination, but Delphi 2009 loads as fast or faster than 
Delphi 7.

Alessandro Federici wrote:
> Hi,
>   I was wondering if any of you can point me to a URLs that show the most 
> important improvements between these versions of Delphi.
> The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 (for 
> which we have licenses).

Sorry, I don't have a URL -- but a friend of mine has moved all his 
companies projects from D2007 to D2009. He debugs complex RemObjects and 
Web servers while simultaneously debugging the clients -- and he tells 
me that D2009 is infinitely more stable than D2007 when asking the IDE 
to some very heavy lifting.

I've played around with it, and the Unicode support is fantastic. I've 
showed some developers what I've been able to do so far -- and those 
developers went from "I won't need Unicode for a few years" to "it's 
going into the roadmap for the next 12 months". A lot of Delphi 
developers will shortly realize how important Unicode is to Delphi (even 
if it should have come a few years earlier).

I just finished perusing Marco Cantu's new book on D2009 -- 400 pages to 
scratch the surface on all the new goodies!

I love the enhancements to TEdit, and a host of other parts of the VCL. 
Truly useful.

I love the enhancements to the Project Manager. Inner exceptions are 
very useful in some circumstances. Exiting with a value makes for 
simpler, more readable code.

Anonymous methods -- I'm still pondering how I'm going to use this going 
forward.

Anyway, if there was ever a time to upgrade, this is it. I've never been 
so impressed with a new version.

Loren Szendre

Indeed, Delphi 2009 is very nice. And they have done a lot of good things. 
From what I have experienced so far, I have only two minor annoyances 
(worked with it on real projects for a week now).

IDE (no restart crashes at all):
1. Once the execution point visual edit marker freezed when doing program 
reset (Ctrl+F2). Fixed by closing the unit and reopening it.

WebSnap:
2. Nasty hack done inside TWebResponse setter of Content 
(TWebResponse.SetUnicodeContent) to get unicode working. 
http://qc.codegear.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=69622 (already opened :) )

The IDE is really snappy, and you don't even need DelphiSpeedUp anymore. 
That should tell you something. So they are really back on track, and I'm 
very excited to see how it will evolve in the next versions to come :)

-Atle

"Alessandro Federici" <none@none.com> wrote in message 
news:51961@forums.codegear.com...
> Hi,
>  I was wondering if any of you can point me to a URLs that show the most 
> important improvements between these versions of Delphi.
> The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 (for 
> which we have licenses).

There's no way to intelligently answer this without knowing a few things:

1) What type of apps are you creating? Do they have an international 
customer base?
2) How many third-party components do you use? Are they still maintained and 
updated for D2009?

D2009 is a breaking change.

However, I should probably point out that now that I have done the hardest 
part of the port to D2009, I am very glad I did. It is indeed one of the 
best Delphi releases ever.

Loren Szendre wrote:

> Anyway, if there was ever a time to upgrade, this is it. I've never
> been so impressed with a new version.

Wow -- thanks very much for the kind words.

Can we quote you on that?


-- 
Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager - Embarcadero
http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges

Atle Smelvaer wrote:

> and you don't even need DelphiSpeedUp anymore.

We worked very closely with Andreas and incorporated much of his
excellent work right into the product.  We and the whole Delphi
community are very indebted to Andreas's expertise and selfless efforts.

-- 
Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager - Embarcadero
http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges

Nick Hodges wrote:

> selfless efforts

I'm actually not that selfless.

DelphiSpeedUp: Ever worked on an old and slow laptop and Delphi 7 needs
5 minutes to start and load all installed packages? And don't tell me
that this is the time to get a cup of coffee.

DDevExtensions: ICQ took over Ctrl+Shift+I (indent) and Ctrl+K+I needs
two key strokes, so I wanted the TAB key (that is the defacto standard
in all other applications) in the default keyboard layout. I hate the
VS keyboard layout. The only selfless extension is the Old Component
Palette.

bcc32pch: I needed to compile Qt 3 in a reasonible time and to show
somebody that Borland (at that time) still had the fastest compiler.
Unfortunately also the one with the most bugs (at that time, the one
that caused me to change thousands of Qt 3 source code lines is still
present and was reported in 2001)

DFMCheck: If you use visual inheritance and frames a lot in your
product and you ever have deployed a broken form to a customer, you
learn to love DFMCheck.

AsyncCalls: I'm also only a developer who looks for an easy
multithreading framework and nothing at that time satisfied me.

XP-Themed DBGrid: DBGrid looks old and outdated without theming.
Especially if you have reimplemented themes for Windows 2000.

dcc32speed: The compiler took ages to create map files that are needed
for stack traces. DelphiSpeedUp had fixed that for the IDE Compiler,
but a homegrown build system that calls the command line compiler
didn't profit from DelphiSpeedUp.

IDE Fix Pack: Should speak for itself.

VCL Fix Pack: Should speak for itself.

IDE Compiler Plugin: That's a different story, that I won't talk about.


Have I forgotten something?

A long time ago in a land...


VisualCLX Patches: There was a time when I had ported some applications
to Linux. And for this I needed a VisualCLX that could be used. But
those times are long gone.



And now tell me that I'm selfless :-)

-- 
Regards,

Andreas Hausladen

"Andreas Hausladen" <AndreasDOTHausladen@gObviousToBeRemovedmx.de> wrote in 
message news:52256@forums.codegear.com...
>
> DelphiSpeedUp: Ever worked on an old and slow laptop and Delphi 7 needs
> 5 minutes to start and load all installed packages?

Maybe you should extend those 640 Kb? :-)

"Iman Crawford" <ilcrawford@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:51966@forums.codegear.com...
[..]
> What kind of applications are you writing?  Win32 client apps,
> services, websnap?

Win32 clients for the most part that D2009 is concerned with.

"Uffe Kousgaard" <oh@no.no> wrote in message 
news:51967@forums.codegear.com...
[..]
>> The objective is convincing the powers-that-pay-the-bills that moving to 
>> D2009 (that we'd have to purchase) is a better idea than moving to D7 
>> (for which we have licenses).
> What are you moving from?

D5 and D7

"John Jacobson" <jake@NOSPAMjsnewsreader.com> wrote in message 
news:52114@forums.codegear.com...
[..]
> There's no way to intelligently answer this without knowing a few things:

That doesn't seem to be the case :)

> 1) What type of apps are you creating?

A mix of client server apps need to be ported and so does a RO/DA client.
Servers are being converted to .NET code and will need to interact with some 
of these (and obviously there's going to be RO in the mix <G>)

> Do they have an international customer base?

Not yet, but those that are potentially coming don't seem to need unicode 
(or so I am told).

> 2) How many third-party components do you use? Are they still maintained 
> and
> updated for D2009?
> D2009 is a breaking change.

Yes, that is our biggest concern as one of the environments we need to port 
has something like 100 3rd party componentsets installed, a bunch of which 
are still using the D5 package format.

> However, I should probably point out that now that I have done the hardest
> part of the port to D2009, I am very glad I did. It is indeed one of the
> best Delphi releases ever.

Good to know.

"Alessandro Federici" <none@none.com> wrote in message 
news:52301@forums.codegear.com...

>> However, I should probably point out that now that I have done the 
>> hardest
>> part of the port to D2009, I am very glad I did. It is indeed one of the
>> best Delphi releases ever.
>
> Good to know.

IMO, On the whole this is not the release that would justify rewriting your 
code-base to accomodate a "breaking change". unless you need unicode 
capability.  But, it is clear to me from the general community feed-back 
that this is a rock-solid release of D7 quality which has enough interesting 
features to justify an upgrade - just to have it; especially as a "good 
will" upgrade.

-d

"Dennis Landi"  wrote:
 
>  - just to have it; especially as a "good  will" upgrade.

https://eservices.goodwill.org/donate/index.cfm

;-)

Andreas,

| And now tell me that I'm selfless :-)

I will tell you that you and your efforts sharing are very much
appreciated!

-- 

   Q

12/07/2008 09:29:58

XanaNews Version 1.18.1.52  [Everyone's & Q's Mods]

"Alessandro Federici" <none@none.com> wrote in message 
news:52301@forums.codegear.com...
>> 2) How many third-party components do you use? Are they still maintained 
>> and
>> updated for D2009?
>> D2009 is a breaking change.
>
> Yes, that is our biggest concern as one of the environments we need to 
> port has something like 100 3rd party componentsets installed, a bunch of 
> which are still using the D5 package format.

That could be a problem, unless the vendors have D2009 versions of their 
components. There's no way to use DCU's from earlier versions of Delphi, 
unlike the compatibility that existed between D2006 and D2007.

"Alessandro Federici" <none@none.com> wrote in message 
news:52299@forums.codegear.com...
> D5 and D7

Wow, that's a big jump. But if there are plans to maintain this code for 
several more years, I think it could be worth it. You could definitely 
improve performance, if nothing else.

Alessandro Federici wrote:

> D5 and D7

And I'm working in D6, of all things, every day.

Wishing it were D7...

-- 

Bill

Andreas Hausladen wrote:

> I'm actually not that selfless.

:-)  In any event, we are very appreciative and grateful for your help.

-- 
Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager - Embarcadero
http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges

"John Jacobson" <jake@NOSPAMjsnewsreader.com> wrote in message 
news:52335@forums.codegear.com...
> [..] There's no way to use DCU's from earlier versions of Delphi,

I am well aware of the problem, so I need good reasons to justify the 
upgrade.
That is, by itself, the biggest problem of them all (accounts for probabily 
95% of the fact we're not more current).

-- 
Saluti,
  Alessandro Federici

-------------------------------
"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually 
happened." (Mark Twain)

Alessandro Federici wrote:

> I am well aware of the problem, so I need good reasons to justify the
> upgrade.  That is, by itself, the biggest problem of them all
> (accounts for probabily 95% of the fact we're not more current).

Almost comes down to the question, of do you /ever/ upgrade that D5
app. I guess you have to weigh up the question of how much active
development will occur with it, how much longer will it be maintained.

I would say that if you are going to actively enhance the product, then
its worth upgrading now, it will always be painfull, best to suck it up
now, before any more significant breakages, and if you are going to
just maintain the product, but will do so for years to come then that's
also probably worth an upgrade (refactoring support in d2006+ gives you
"callee graph" type ability, that's worth the price of admission in
complex projects by itself)

Tim Jarvis wrote:
> also probably worth an upgrade (refactoring support in d2006+ gives you
> "callee graph" type ability, that's worth the price of admission in
> complex projects by itself)


"callee graph" type ability?

Okay, I'm an idiot.  What does this mean?

David Erbas-White

"Tim Jarvis" <tim@jarvis.com.au> wrote in message 
news:52416@forums.codegear.com...
[..]
> Almost comes down to the question, of do you /ever/ upgrade that D5
> app. I guess you have to weigh up the question of how much active
> development will occur with it, how much longer will it be maintained.

It's one of the most important apps we sell and it's being 
developed/expanded almost on a daily basis.

> I would say that if you are going to actively enhance the product, then
> its worth upgrading now, it will always be painfull, best to suck it up
> now, before any more significant breakages, and if you are going to
> just maintain the product, but will do so for years to come then that's
> also probably worth an upgrade (refactoring support in d2006+ gives you
> "callee graph" type ability, that's worth the price of admission in
> complex projects by itself)

Good to know. I'll look into this feature for advertisment purposes <G>

In article <52256@forums.codegear.com>,
 Andreas Hausladen <AndreasDOTHausladen@gObviousToBeRemovedmx.de> 
 wrote:

> (at that time, the one
> that caused me to change thousands of Qt 3 source code lines is still
> present and was reported in 2001)

   What's the QC/RAID number on that? I can't find anything of yours 
that is that old.
-- 
David Dean (Embarcadero)
Lead C++ QA Engineer

David Dean (Embarcadero) wrote:

>    What's the QC/RAID number on that? I can't find anything of yours 
> that is that old.

Sorry, I mixed up the QC report. The one I thought of is already fixed in Delphi 2009 but the one I meant isn't.


And here are my steps:
bcc32 -c main.cpp


main.cpp:
//----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
class QString {
public:
    inline QString() {}
    inline QString(char *c) { str = c; };

    operator char*() const { return str; }
    QString operator=(char *c) { return QString(c); }
private:
    char *str;
};

int main(int, char*[])
{
    bool condition = false;
    QString c = "Hallo";

/* ?-operator fails with:
   Error E2354 main.cpp 23: Two operands must evaluate to the same type
in function main(int,char * *)
*/
    QString s = condition ? c : "Hallo";
    return 0;
}
//----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----



-- 
Regards,

Andreas Hausladen

Here is the QC report for the bug I meant:

QC 24830 / RAID 428251
?-operator does not convert the expressions to the same type


-- 
Regards,

Andreas Hausladen

In article <53025@forums.codegear.com>,
 Andreas Hausladen <AndreasDOTHausladen@gObviousToBeRemovedmx.de> 
 wrote:

> Sorry, I mixed up the QC report. The one I thought of is already fixed in 
> Delphi 2009 but the one I meant isn't.

   OK, that one is on my radar. It affects several libraries and 
utilities so I also very much want to see it fixed.
-- 
David Dean (Embarcadero)
Lead C++ QA Engineer

David Erbas-White wrote:

> "callee graph" type ability?
> 
> Okay, I'm an idiot.  What does this mean?

You are far from being an idiot David.
 
> David Erbas-White

:-)

I stole the term from an earlier version of Lutz Roeder's reflector,
it's now referred to as "depends on"

Basically you can get a report/graph on references to and from symbols.
When you are trying to get your head around a complex (or even not too
complex) frameworks it's a (imo) must have.

Regards Tim.

William Meyer wrote:
> Alessandro Federici wrote:
> 
>> D5 and D7
> 
> And I'm working in D6, of all things, every day.
> 
> Wishing it were D7...
> 

Hey!  I liked D6 and would have used it longer had it had support for new 
ComCtrl theming.  That said, D2007 and now D2009 are really very nice products.

--
Warm Regards,

Lee

Lee Jenkins wrote:

> Hey!  I liked D6 and would have used it longer...

Well, I'd really much rather move at least to D7.

-- 

Bill

"William Meyer" <meyer.wil@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:53844@forums.codegear.com...
> Lee Jenkins wrote:
>
>> Hey!  I liked D6 and would have used it longer...
>
> Well, I'd really much rather move at least to D7.
>
> -- 

Hmm?  The Golden Delphi?   I am afraid this is an Invitation-Only club. 
Very exclusive.  Sorry.

-d

Dennis Landi wrote:

> Hmm?  The Golden Delphi?   I am afraid this is an Invitation-Only
> club. Very exclusive.  Sorry.

Yeah, the one I have used since it was brand new, everywhere but on
this job....

-- 

Bill