Adam


There are probably a lot of us antiques around. My last pre-Delphi was PICK in the guise of AP/DOS

Roy Lambert

Adam

This is a good thread. My experience broadly mirrors that of others here. D3 was my starting point, then D5, D7 and a big pause (anyone remember Inprise, Codegear?) to D2007, now XE2 which I have stuck on.

I have downloaded XE4, 5 & 6 & ruined a few really nice days installing them, getting components working etc., in order to find out that from a VCL perspective not much has _really_ improved.

I think there are now a good number of real improvements XE6 compared to D2007, but nothing life-changing. I find the most recent version slightly more stable than older versions despite everything people say. Newer versions can be slower as more and more "stuff" is included.

A major issue is that upgrading really is a massive job for me, at least a couple of days and that if nothing major goes wrong. With my D2007 install I had to totally wipe my development machine twice ... thank you Borland (or was it Codegear!!).

I need to move on to Android development. I have done some toy stuff and customers really like it. But I genuinely don't think the platform (Firemonkey) is really mature enough yet. I will hold off until the last possible moment & then plunge in ... XE10?? Hopefully some of the installation issues will have been sorted out by then.

Adam

On 7/22/2014 3:37 AM, Adam H. wrote:

> Are the more recent versions of Delphi more solid than what I've
> experienced? Is there much advantage for the non-unicode VCL-only
> developer in updating at the moment?

Using D2007 (for our DBISAM based app) and XE2 for rest at this time.

Also have XE6 which appears quite decent but have only ported some
smaller utility apps so not very extensive use yet.

Plan was to move to XE6 (from XE2) but that has slipped so might wait
and see if XE7 ships in the fall at this point and if it has something new.

For us the main reasons for moving to newer delphi are unicode and 64bit
support (some of our apps integrate with hardware devices and drivers
require a 64bit app now).

Better RTTI and generics are something i consider useful as well (even
with their drawbacks) but benefit would only be for newer apps at this
point as we would not go and change existing code (which has been tested
and works) to take advantage of it.


Raul

Hi Adam,

It sounds like XE6 might be worth keeping an eye on. Then again, since
Delphi 7 was my favorite todate, maybe XE7 will be the bees knees.

> A major issue is that upgrading really is a massive job for me, at least a couple of days and that if nothing major goes wrong. With my D2007 install I had to totally wipe my development machine twice ... thank you Borland (or was it Codegear!!).

I am (or was) the same. I changed my development setup a few years ago
to Virtual machines. With the ability to have multiple virtual machines,
take snapshots, and roll back - very handy indeed to say the least.

(Plus it allows me to support clients I haven't heard from in nearly a
decade when they come back and want changes made - I just fire up the
old machine and make the changes - don't have to worry about updating
their projects to the latest IDE and component suite I have if it's not
required.

I've even got a virtual machine of DOS running one of our old Paradox
applications. Not that it's used for production anymore, but it's
interesting to boot up once in a while and take a trip down memory lane.

> I need to move on to Android development. I have done some toy stuff and customers really like it. But I genuinely don't think the platform (Firemonkey) is really mature enough yet. I will hold off until the last possible moment & then plunge in ... XE10?? Hopefully some of the installation issues will have been sorted out by then.

Indeed - VCL seemed to start off far better. I remember Delphi 1. That
coupled with rx components (anyone remember those that gave me
filtering options on TTable components worked a treat. Then filtering
became native to TTables in D2 and away everything went. The only regret
I had back in those early days was not finding DBISAM sooner!

Personally I would prefer a new version of Delphi to be released every
18 months, and each version patched to be as stable as possible - as
opposed to a new version every 6 months with new features, but each of
them with their issues.

Cheers

Adam

Hi Malcolm,

> For convenience I have just completed the move of my VCL apps to XE6
> which was a painful exercise in persuading certain ancient 3rd party
> components that they could be compiled and installed after a bit of
> massaging.

I'm in the process of upgrading some of my applications from D2007 to
XE2 - and that's taking a lot of work. (UNICODE issues mostly). I was
hoping that VCL upgrades from XE2 to XE6 would be a lot simpler - but
are you saying that there's a lot of breaking changes between these
versions as well?

> When XE7 come out I will have to think long and hard about whether to
> hope it fixes the final bug I face and whether I have the strength for
> the 3rd party installation battle.

That's where I'm at, at the moment - hence my original questions.

Cheers

Adam.

Hi Raul,

Thanks for your reply.

It seems D2006/D2007 and XE2 seem to be quite popular amongst the
platforms at the moment...

> Also have XE6 which appears quite decent but have only ported some
> smaller utility apps so not very extensive use yet.
>
> Plan was to move to XE6 (from XE2) but that has slipped so might wait
> and see if XE7 ships in the fall at this point and if it has something new.

If XE7 is that close it might be better for me to wait and see. If XE7
is not that great, I can always still use XE6 I guess.

Cheers

Adam

On 7/23/2014 6:50 PM, Adam H. wrote:

Adam,

> If XE7 is that close it might be better for me to wait and see. If XE7
> is not that great, I can always still use XE6 I guess.

XE7 release is speculation on my part but not an unreasonable one as XE5
did ship in sept 2013 and Embarcadero AFAIK is still planning 2 releases
a year.

Than again it might be few months before hotfix 1 ships and all 3rd
party components get updated.

Raul

Adam H. wrote:

> Hi Malcolm,
>
> I'm in the process of upgrading some of my applications from D2007 to
> XE2 - and that's taking a lot of work. (UNICODE issues mostly). I was
> hoping that VCL upgrades from XE2 to XE6 would be a lot simpler - but
> are you saying that there's a lot of breaking changes between these
> versions as well?
>

Not necessarily.
I had 3 problems due to 3rd party components.

 1.  I use SpTBX stuff and that required some editing of source code
to allow compilation and installation (this was the easy one as it was
documented, if a bit fiddly)

 2.  I need components for serial comms and in past have used
AsyncPro.  It has two forks, one partly updated for unicode but that
one was missing stuff I needed, so I was left with the earlier version
that is all ansi.  This required me to edit some of the source to
eliminate compiler errors.  I just ignored all the warnings about ansi
<> uniciode conversions.  But it took a lot of Googling to unearth the
new compiler parameters needed to get it installed.

 3.  I decided to switch from one 3rd party TCP set of components to
the Indy Project ones.  Then I found that Indy had some bugs under
Android but Remy does not have any Android kit so identifying and
fixing the bugs was hard and slow.

You may be lucky and find almost no problems beyond the usual suspects
such as code moving between units and the need to do a bit more scoping.

Malcolm

Malcolm


> 1. I use SpTBX

Wasn't that TnT based?

> 3. I decided to switch from one 3rd party TCP set of components to
>the Indy Project ones. Then I found that Indy had some bugs under
>Android but Remy does not have any Android kit so identifying and
>fixing the bugs was hard and slow.

I think Remy is doing a better job of looking after it but I still prefer synapse.

Roy Lambert

Roy Lambert wrote:

> Malcolm wrote
>
> > 1. I use SpTBX
>
> Wasn't that TnT based?

Hi Roy.  It started off as TToolBar by Jordan Russell.  
When Jordan froze it, Robert Lee wrapped it up into SpTBXLib and has
been keeping that going.
The fiddly bit is that we have to make a few edits to the ToolBar
source for later compilers - Robert is not allowed to re-distribute
edited TB source.
>
> > 3. I decided to switch from one 3rd party TCP set of components to
> > the Indy Project ones. Then I found that Indy had some bugs under
> > Android but Remy does not have any Android kit so identifying and
> > fixing the bugs was hard and slow.
>
> I think Remy is doing a better job of looking after it but I still
> prefer synapse.

Yes, I can't quite believe how much effort Remy puts into it.  But I
also have to ask myself how much of that work he could avoid if there
was some documentation or at least a coherent collection of examples.
There are so many code snippets in the ngs that if I was more
knowledgeable I would consider extracting and classifying them with a
view to popping them into a wiki or something for him to correct/tweak
and then point people at.  While I was doing my recent conversion I had
to do a lot of Googling and searching of ngs to get answers that should
have been readily available.

I looked at Synapse a few times over the years, but when I last looked
(a few weeks ago) there was still no version for XE6.

My longer term plan is to remove as many 3rd party components as I can
in preparation for the day when I lose my faculties and have to hand
over my source to some other enthusiast .. or make it open source ....
or bin it.  

Malcolm