I’ve been a Delphi programmer for a long time. Since version 1, actually. I’ve been a Borlands fan for even longer. But lately, I haven’t kept up with my Delphi upgrades.
There are a number of factors involved, but it boils down to Borland not adding enough new functionality to merit having to upgrade and reinstall all of my components. Well, I just took a look at Delphi 2005, and it’s pretty darn functional.
First off, hats off to Borland for finally coming out of the dark ages in IDE design. I don’t really care for the pseudo-MDI part of the pseuod-MDI interface, but when it comes down to it, it’s the better way to get the job done.
Delphi isn’t just Delphi any more. It’s everything they make in terms of a development platform bundled into one tight IDE. Delphi 2005 comes with C# Builder, Delphi VCL, and Delphi .net. You can build assemblies for either VCL or .net, and there’s even a migration wizard for VCL components to move to .net, although I haven’t tried it to see how successful it is yet.
This is just one example of the cool things that the new Delphi IDE does. It’s a smart IDE, trying to keep the options you’re going to use on-screen and available when you need them. It seems pretty handy for that. Actually, there were a couple of times when I thought, “Ok, where is the feature I need now,” and started to look around, only to eventually notice that elements of the UI had morphed to push that very feature right up where I would find it.
Anyway, the system looks pretty cool so far. I’ll have to toy with writing some .net projects, which will hopefully benefit my skillset - Yeah, right. If I come up with any cool little test apps, I’ll be sure to share them.
