Delphi 9 Preview

Borcon 2004 at Bangalore was great this year. Thanks to Borland India for arranging it. There was lot of enthusiasm among all. John Kaster show cased Delphi 9. Finally we have a new Delphi product that seems to live up to Delphi community expectations! After Delphi 8 release most of the Delphi fanatics were bit disappointed as lot was expected from Borland. And at time Visual Studio .NET 2003 seemed to be far better than Delphi 8.

Anyway, now we are going to have Delphi 9 in about 2 month’s time. And from what I can see in the preview / demo that JK gave us, Delphi 9 rocks and is ready to kick ass competition.

New Features of Delphi 9

Single IDE for Delphi Win32, Delphi VCL .NET, Delphi WinForms and C# (Remember Galileo?)

Refactoring - After seeing this in Borland JBuilder all Delphi Developers wanted this and finally it's debuting with D9

Extract method
Extract resource string
Rename
Declare field and variable
Find unit or namespace

Versioning / new History tab

SyncEdit

New language features (for both Win32 and .NET)
for ... in ... do enumeration syntax (like for...each in C#)
Function inlining

Compact Framework Support
No designer or debugger - only compile. I think this has to do with MS not
releasing the SDK for CF.

ECO II

Extended ASP .NET support

Some Delphi 9 "cool features" that are not part of CLR 1.0
Class reference types
Class helpers
Sets
Virtual constructors

Built-in IDE QualityCentral reporting

What's missing in D9 -

There is no support for Generics (Whidbey / .NET 2.0), Multicast events

What I feel is that Delphi 9 is a great product for converting the existing Delphi VCL applications to .NET. Borland is very well known for giving backward compatibility. Also VCL .NET is supposed to faster than WinForms in terms of performance.

However, a few questions comes to mind for which it is difficult to find answers.

1. It's easier to port a VCL application to VCL .NET agreed. But what if the existing VCL product uses a lot of 3rd party components which are written using VCL but there exists not solution for VCL .NET?

2. I happen use Dev Express components such as Quantum Grid, Express Bar for VCL on Win32 and their WinForms components (Xtra Grid and Xtra Bar, which are unbeleivably similar). So if I want to port my VCL application that uses these components I would look at VS .NET and C# since I already have these components for .NET. Dev Express has stated that they will come out with VCL .NET versions, but not sure when they will?

3. Finally I feel that when MS comes out with a newer version of .NET (say 2.0 next year), they also come out with the IDE that supports the latest version. Where as Delphi developers have to wait for 6 - 12 months to use these new technologies. For e.g. Delphi 9 won't be supporting .NET 2.0 or SQL Server 2005 (John Kaster says there might not be an update for D9 to support .NET 2.0!) So we have to wait for D10 to work with .NET 2.0.

4. No support for Comptact Framework development

But whatever said and done, Delphi 9 is out now! and is a great upgrade for those who have Delphi 6/7 with them. So go and get your licensed copy now!

Any suggestions please feel free to contact me at - nbaliga@tiersolution.com or fill up the Comments at this site.