It has become quite apparent in the last twelve hours that it was a mistake
for us to even attempt to cut down on the number of legacy development
environments that we target with our ElevateDB product offerings, so please
disregard the phase-out plan that was sent out yesterday.

If you sent us a personal email or newsgroup post regarding this issue,
please consider this the reply.  And frankly, I'm a little shocked at the
personal anger directed toward us in some of the emails that we received.
Contrary to what some apparently think, the phase-out plan was not a
personal affront directed at any specific group of customers, nor was it a
decision that was made lightly.  We analyzed the downloads by target IDE for
ElevateDB and concluded that what we came up with as being fair and most
optimal for our needs.

Finally, just to clarify for everyone:

- Yes, we do have a automated build system.  The issue is not that we're
doing builds by hand, it's that it takes more than 2 1/2 hours just for the
*build machine* to do all of the automated builds.  We will be adding 3 more
C++ Unicode builds in the next month in addition to two new Visual Studio
builds as part of our DAC product line, so it is only getting worse.  This
means that if there is an error in one of the builds, that the whole time
can quickly add up to an entire day.  Combined with the automated testing
and other aspects of the builds, it currently takes me at least 2 days to do
a simple build, let alone a minor release.  In sum total, the result is that
a bug fix build comes out once a month instead of once a week or bi-weekly.

- No, we're not "moving on" to target Visual Studio only.  We have been
supporting Borland/CodeGear products faithfully for our entire existence and
will continue to do so.  Frankly, I'm not sure how one could construe the
phase-out of support for legacy compilers (that even Borland/CodeGear don't
support anymore) in favor of newer compilers in such a way.  If we were
getting rid of support for CodeGear products, we would not support their
*new* compilers, give out product at CodeRage conferences, and all of the
other things that we do as a CodeGear Technology Partner.  In fact, we
thought that the phase-out plan was also a good way to encourage those using
the older compilers to try the new offerings from CodeGear.  RAD Studio 2007
works fine for us here and is a great IDE for both .NET 2.0 and Win32
development.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim


>And frankly, I'm a little shocked at the
>personal anger directed toward us

So am I, and hopefully most of the ElevateSoft community. There are some of your decisions that I hate (NULL's especially) but I generally understand there are good reasons for them and will continue to support, and complain.

>In sum total, the result is that
>a bug fix build comes out once a month instead of once a week or bi-weekly.

Possibly a silly suggestion and not one I really like but would it be possible to split the builds so the "depreciated" IDE's only received a bugfix issue say once every two months with the fully supported ones at a more frequent schedule? I have to confess to a bias here - the only reason I've downloaded the D6 version is so I can build my conversion routine into a single .exe and for that as long as you don't change structures I should be OK with what I have now.

>RAD Studio 2007
>works fine for us here and is a great IDE for both .NET 2.0 and Win32
>development.

Ah - one of the lucky ones eh I bet you have very few 3rd party tools installed. I really pity some of the people posting on CodeGears ngs.

Roy Lambert

Roy,

<< Possibly a silly suggestion and not one I really like but would it be
possible to split the builds so the "depreciated" IDE's only received a
bugfix issue say once every two months with the fully supported ones at a
more frequent schedule? I have to confess to a bias here - the only reason
I've downloaded the D6 version is so I can build my conversion routine into
a single .exe and for that as long as you don't change structures I should
be OK with what I have now. >>

Frankly, it might be easier to just purchase a faster build machine and try
to optimize the builds so that they run faster.

<< Ah - one of the lucky ones eh I bet you have very few 3rd party
tools installed. I really pity some of the people posting on CodeGears ngs.
>>

I don't have much time to troll those newsgroups.  What are the main issues
that people are having ?

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Having been a DBISAM customer for years, and knowing the marvellous service
that Elevate provide, and the high esteem in which the company in general,
and Tim in particular are held within the developer community, I am too amd
shocked that you were in receipt of e-mails of the type you describe. I
didn't send one!

Having said that, I was very disappointed when I received the notification
that you were going to phase out support for D7. Having spent the last
couple of months wrestling with Studio 2007, I had decided to forget it
altogether and planned to continue with D7 for the foreseeable future.

I have it installed on two fairly high-spec machines and find it slow, and
clunky. I didn't think much of the Help system in previous Delphi versions,
but over a minute from pressing F1 to finally getting a load of references
about products and platforms that don't interest me (regardless of trying to
filter for only D2007 for Win32) is just OTT.

I also find that the two-monitor setup that I've been using since '98 is
pretty much useless now with the strange strait-jacket interface that allows
me to see only one form at a time, and this for some reason "glued" to the
back of the code window, so that the form size is constrained or resticted
by the size of the editor window. As far as I'm, concerned, CodeGear have
completely lost the plot in producing an IDE that drops all the inherent
advantages of the original in favour of something with the look and feel of
Visual Basic circa 1999.

Sorry - rant over!

I still think Elevate and Tim are the best things that ever happened to
Delphi.

Tim


>Frankly, it might be easier to just purchase a faster build machine and try
>to optimize the builds so that they run faster.

Yeah and one of those solid state disks - tell Santa although I'm not sure just how hi-tech he is

><< Ah - one of the lucky ones eh I bet you have very few 3rd party
>tools installed. I really pity some of the people posting on CodeGears ngs.
> >>
>
>I don't have much time to troll those newsgroups. What are the main issues
>that people are having ?

One of the main issues seems to revolve around project groups - the IDE eats memory until it crashes, another is error insight making the IDE about as responsive as a dead slug. One guy had the form size reset no matter what he set hight & width to. The first two seem to be the only common ones the rest vary wildly.

Roy Lambert

"Wow" again. I hope you didn't think I was being abusive in any way.

I think if you want ElevateDB to be just for D2007, that is perfectly fine.
I haven't adopted it for any projects yet, but I understand you can't devote
time to older IDEs if the newer one is making your money. Right now D7 and
VS200x is making me money so that is what I work with.

I was just surprised to see the notice on the same day I revisted these
groups after a long absense.

Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

-Johnnie

Tim,

I saw some kind of parallel build system that uses multiple computers in
some kind of distributed fashion. I haven't personally tried it, but it
sounds interesting. I'll see if I can find it if you think it might help.

-Johnnie

Roj,

<< Having said that, I was very disappointed when I received the
notification that you were going to phase out support for D7. Having spent
the last couple of months wrestling with Studio 2007, I had decided to
forget it altogether and planned to continue with D7 for the foreseeable
future. >>

Let me also clarify the D7 decision a bit.  The issue that I'm running into
is that the code is starting to get IF-DEFed to hell and back with all of
the new platforms, etc. that we're targeting.  One of the quickest ways to
eliminate a lot of that was to remove D5 and BCB5 support.  However, one of
the other issues is Unicode support, and the issues with it really revolve
around D2005 and lower support.  D2005 was a little too new, so I figured
that D7 was a good candidate still based upon the fact that it's almost 6
years old.  I didn't necessarily want to do so because I like D7 very much
also (I wrote EDB using it), but I'm not the one incrementing the calendar
every day.  My big fear is that we're going to start to see some major
deviations from the past in upcoming CodeGear versions with respect to
Unicode support and some other things, and I would like to take advantage of
them in EDB without being tied to the past.  For example, even if CodeGear
came out with generics support for Win32 tomorrow, I couldn't use it in the
EDB code because of the older compilers.  This has become painfully clear to
me during the .NET provider development.  The Delphi.NET compiler and the
Chrome compilers have some serious improvements on the Win32 compilers in
terms of language features.

<< I have it installed on two fairly high-spec machines and find it slow,
and clunky. I didn't think much of the Help system in previous Delphi
versions, but over a minute from pressing F1 to finally getting a load of
references about products and platforms that don't interest me (regardless
of trying to filter for only D2007 for Win32) is just OTT. >>

That's very funny, because my big complaint is that the .NET framework help
is not present when I launch D2007.  I *only* see the CodeGear help and the
Windows API help, just like with past versions.

<< I also find that the two-monitor setup that I've been using since '98 is
pretty much useless now with the strange strait-jacket interface that allows
me to see only one form at a time, and this for some reason "glued" to the
back of the code window, so that the form size is constrained or resticted
by the size of the editor window. As far as I'm, concerned, CodeGear have
completely lost the plot in producing an IDE that drops all the inherent
advantages of the original in favour of something with the look and feel of
Visual Basic circa 1999. >>

They definitely need to do more to allow for a completely-undocked IDE for
those that want it.  It's close right now, but being able to un-dock the
form from the code would be the nice final touch.  I personally prefer the
undocked look also.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

>
> I still think Elevate and Tim are the best things that ever happened to
> Delphi.

Well said!

I agree though with your view on the phase out of Delphi 7. I also still
use it a lot. But the phase out is being withdrawn, so no worries!

Johnnie,

<< "Wow" again. I hope you didn't think I was being abusive in any way. >>

No, not at all, nothing you posted fell into that category.

<< I think if you want ElevateDB to be just for D2007, that is perfectly
fine. I haven't adopted it for any projects yet, but I understand you can't
devote time to older IDEs if the newer one is making your money. Right now
D7 and
VS200x is making me money so that is what I work with. >>

It's not just money right now.  It's the future of CodeGear and Elevate
Software that is at issue here.  We use their compilers to develop our
products, so if customers don't buy the CodeGear IDEs and they go away, then
we lose the ability to write any products in the future using their
compilers.  Thus we're screwed and are forced to port our entire product
line over to an entirely different compiler.  Put more exactly, without RAD
Studio 2007 we don't put out a .NET 2.0 data provider without porting EDB
entirely to Chrome or C#.  If CodeGear goes away, then we will be forced to
move entirely to another IDE/compiler and leave the Delphi market behind,
which I certainly do not want to do in any way, shape, or form.  So, we can
all sit around and relish the good 'ole days of Delphi 7 and earlier, or we
can move forward and keep supporting CodeGear in a way that ultimately
benefits us all.

<<  Have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. >>

Thanks, you too.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com