Delphi 2010 - First Impressions - What's New and What Has Been Improved

Hi Zarko, i bulive that Delphi 7 is still better than 2010, most of the new feauters can be implemented(ported) to Delphi 7, what’s the use of spending alot of money for this version…?

@delphigeist: Hm, when you have such presumptions than it is hard to “convince” you that you should move to Delphi 2010 (or Delphi 2009, 2007). If you do not see what you gain with refactoring, anonymous methods, Unicode, class helpers, strongly typed lists, attributes, … it is hard to just say “Delphi 2010 is better than Delphi 7″. You actually have to try and see for yourself.

You questions is in line with “why buy a new car when the old one can also get me from point a to point b”. Well: speed, safety, fuel consumption, …

Refactoring can be done with an Expert, anonymous methods(can live without), unicode no biggy , class helpers are very nice but delphi developers coded without them alot of years, generics i don’t really see their point but it could be just me…, attributes i don’t really know/see their purpose.
P.S. I’m not trying to start an argue about Delphi 7 vs 2010, i’m just trying to point out that these feauters does not justify the price, not to mention that freepascal will have all those implemented by the end of this year.

Delphi 7 is now dangerously old. It barely runs on Vista, and may be even worse on Windows 7.

Many ancient delphi developers who think they can ignore unicode, are doing so at their own, and their customer’s perils. Maybe you can keep writing apps like it’s 1990, until 2020, in your vertical market, but if you take pride in your work as a professional developer on Windows, you should just learn to live in the Unicode world.

I expect a certain crankj faction in the Delphi world to stay on Delphi 6 or 7 forever. That’s just the way of things. But the smart people are learning the new stuff, and loving it.

And if you get paid to write software, the price is a non-issue. If you’re an amateur, maybe it’s hard to justify any price. But if you’re a pro, you are wasting your time and money if you don’t buy a recent Delphi version. For me, Delphi 2009 is great, and I’m hopeful that Delphi 2010 is even better.

Delphi 2005/2006 were such giant piles of crap that some delphi developers decided to “stay put forever”. That’s professional suicide, friend.

W

@warren Your right man! thank you for opening my eyes (*.*), i’ve developed an application for a vetenerian clinic in romania, wich runs smoothly on: Win 2k, Win XP, Win Vista(hes OS), Windows 7, I’ve tested the application in any way i could think of to be sure it works perfectly, i used 3rd party components like: GPStructuredStorage, VirtualStringTree, HIGButton, etc…
About your “professional issues”, investing should be a “let me think first” for every developer, anonymous methods or code refactoring does really justify the investment ? if so i rest my case.
{$IFDEF DELPHI_2010}
raise Exception.Create(’Really bad investment’);
{$ENDIF}
*It barely runs on Vista* i don’t really know what did you try to say with that but windows vista is dangerously g*y and can say “old” also because Win 7 is coming hard and Microsoft will do anything possible to flood fill the market with it like they did with vista.

@delphigeist, If getting by with the bare minimum as to avoid unnecessary expenses, then why Delphi 7? Why not stay at 6, 4, 4, or 3? You could have coded everything 7 provided in those versions too. The experts work in those versions too.

There is far more value to moving from 7 to 2010 than there is moving from 3, 4, 5, and 6 to 7.

I agree with all of the above. Delphi 2010 is quite nice and I can find some useful things to do with it – yet I still favor Delphi 7 to it’s best. I have a Vista machine at work, and I don’t have a single problem with it. I ported the help files as well because that was getting on my nerves.

The one thing I really wanted to see from Delphi 2010 is the ability to make desktop widgets. I’m currently doing a job for someone – and I am having huge troubles with it. Yet, with the progress I have made so far, Delphi 7 is doing it perfectly. In fact, I’m sure Delphi 5 would too.

There’s one thing in particular I do like about Delphi 2010. Gestures. They make my life so much easier as I am also doing a Point of Sale project for a restaurant. Gestures really make the hard things become easy, and it opens up a lot of new doors.

What I don’t like about the newer versions of Delphi is that they haven’t changed much over the years. CodeGear and Embarcadero have kept using the toolbar icons and general layouts to that of Delphi 7. Not that I’m necessarily complaining – Delphi 7 is the best. Yet, I think that if Delphi 2010 were to become a
{$IFDEF DELPHI_2010}
raise Exception.Create(’Really good investment’);
it would have to have something completely different. They would have to create a new idea of Delphi programming. This would include a complete change in interface.

I can see why they never did it though – most Delphi developers still like the good old stuff. Yet CodeGear and Embarcadero have made it a bad investment.

I have just downloaded the 31 day trial, and it seems okay. I prefer the docked layout to the undocked one – but thats not worth the extra money. I could easily create an expert that docks all the windows.

All in all – I think Delphi 2010 has its greats – yet not enough to get me to buy it. Delphi 7 is still the king… I have made a lot of customizations to it – and I still love it
{$ENDIF}

@delphigeist

Delphi 7 is a very good release. If you don’t think there’s enough value in the latest versions, then you are right to not upgrade. In which case, it would be more correct to say that Delphi 2010 is a bad investment for you.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll like Delphi 2011 better.

Speaking for myself, I like the new releases a lot (enough to pay for SA) and absolutely love Delphi 2010, even for the things that I could use third party tools for, but especially for the things that I can’t.

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

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352080/delphi-incremental-changes-from-d7-to-d2009

@Michael Rockett thank you for supporting my point

@Kyle Miller Why Delphi 7? well v. 6 is a bit sloppy, v. 5 is a bit too old but even 5, 6(if you have them) are great for development, i pointed out v. 7 beacause it’s still supported by most 3rd party components out there, while 5 and 6 are not…
Anywayz delphi is great from 1st version(take that C#, C++, vb(yuk)) i was just trying to say in the end delphi 2010 doesn’t worth it’s price, you can build applications with Delphi(any version you got), port it to Freepascal and TADAM! you got support for alot of OS’s.
Checkout my blog delphigeist, if you got custom experts for delphi please post on my blog, i will make them public available so others can enjoy them.
Bottom line, Embarcadero should come up with alot of useful feauters and a lower price in Delphi 2011 or else they will lose even *i have money and want to upgrade just for the new color scheme*, excuse me for being ironic, but i can’t stand those people.
delphigeist

@delphigeist Which improvements would make you upgrade to a new Delphi-version?

@Jarn checkout my blog, i’ve started a subject on that. delphigeist blog

@delphigeist. Comments at your blog…

I used to say the same thing about Delphi 7. I saw no reason to move to 2007 or 2009; until I started writing intensive applications. I remember the first application I moved from 7 to 2007, without changing anything, ran 30% faster. The main reason I moved. Then I customers wanted unicode support, so I moved on yet again. Yes it can be implemented in 7, but why make things harder on yourself.

And after giving 2010 a try, I found my most data intensive app to be slower when compiled in 2010 than 2009.

@Dagan Hoover Well if you put it this way, yes you need to upgrade, but the only version i would upgrade to(if i must) is delphi 2009 and that only for the unicode support.
Don’t get me wrong guys, I have nothing against Embarcadero or any new version of Delphi, I just try to open some eyes, feauters that doesn’t improve productivity doesn’t justify the price.
Let’s be real on this, did you ever used generics because it’s faster than implementing a custom type list or anonymous methods(don’t get me starting on attributes)?
delphigeist

Delphi has too big problems: Visual Studio (C#) and price.
It’s all a matter of popularity and VS is popular because it’s made by MS, not because it’s better or cleaner in syntax or has feature X or Y.
The second problem is more obvious when you look at the competition, there is a huge price difference between Delphi and VS, that alone makes new developers want to use it because they don’t have a business or salary that would justify the price.
Keeping the price too high for all versions is a huge mistake and will cost CodeGear a lot in the end.
People will still use D7 because they already have it, it’s better than any other IDE/Compiler combo and people don’t feel the need to upgrade yet. The price is not even an option for many new developers.
Instead of upgrading to a newer Delphi version with Unicode (can be done in D7) and maybe native 64 bit compiler. They will rather move to VS because of their management that wants to go with the trends and claims there are too few Delphi developers and some (Java folks) even claim Delphi is “a toy” without ever trying or reading anything technical about it. Some other Delphi developers try to migrate to Lazarus and FreePascal because they feel at home in that environment, the compiler is very powerful, they have Unicode as UTF8 directly as AnsiStrings and some nice syntax sugar with multiplatform support and ever growing number of API headers and Components.
At work we still use D6 even if we have licenses for D2006 because nobody feels the need to have a better debugger and IDE and wonder if migration wouldn’t cost a lot of development time and introduce bugs in the process. The management tries to convert our projects to other languages to be able to get more developers and probably pay them less.
Being a big Delphi(Object Pascal) fan i try hard not to switch completely to other tools and languages so at home i work with Lazarus/FPC while at work i work with D6 even for web development (CGI based because i find PHP too ugly) and sometimes i code in JavaScript or ActionScript (Flash/Swish) but always try to keep Delphi alive in the companies i work for aven if there is a major trend for C# or Java.

Delphi 2010 still CANNOT remember the exact positions of toolbars. Every time that I open Delphi I have to reposition them on the screen. The BACK and FORWARD buttons are positioned on some crappy toolbar that cannot be placed conveniently near the their old position in Delphi 7. That is my list of visual frustrations that I encounter every time I use the new IDE.
But there is GOOD THINGS also. IDE is FAST. VERY FAST. That is GOOOOOOOD.

I completely agree with delphigeist. Even more, I was pleased with D5 but some useful tools like GExperts and the so, began to drop support. More and new features are introduced with many developers not knowing what they are, how to use ‘em or even what they are. I made the hyperjump to D2007 and although I hated the ms look and feel and the completely useless help system (why do I want to know about a vb keyword if I’m using Delphi?) I feel more less comfortable until the horrible D2009, and the unicode nightmare (tons of code that does not even compile and no, it is not code that assumes sizeof(char) = 1) and as it seems that Codegear no longer cares about their customers, I’ll stick to D2007 for a while. Fortunately, I don’t need to write code for Bulgaria delphigeist!

i think Delphi 7 is still enough for creating windows application. Its easier to use.

So a question to you all, Is Delphi still a viable option for companies to go for when there are so many C# developers on the market?
I have found that there is a huge lack of Delphi developers in the UK market and decent paid jobs for Delphi developers only seem to come along every 4 months.

I have been developing a system using D5 for a number of years now, and have been fairly happy with it but have had some issues with the IDE and access violations on closing the IDE. But it has worked ok, now we have had a colleague leave so we have asked one of our other developers to help out on this particular application. He uses VS primarily C# and spent the first 2 months complaining about using an old antiquated IDE. So moving forward we have purchased Delphi 2010 for delivery soon and have had to pay to update our DevExpress components which we use extensively. We are going to be embarking on a 4 month project to convert the application to work with the new version of Delphi. I had used D2006 to do an upgrade of another application and liked it once I got used to it.

I would have been quite happy to stay with Delphi 5, but do see benefits moving forward with 2010 and am looking forward to getting to grips with it. This has got to be easier than moving to VS and C#!

I was using Delphi since version 1 at school and since version 4 at work. Delphi 2010 is the first version I have bought for my personal use and I think it is the best version ever despite some problems (help system). Without Unicode Delphi would be dead and obsolete product. This is argument also for those who do not need Unicode. They simply had to do it. And attributes and improved RTTI is very nice addition…

I will upgrade my Delphi 7 … if the new Delphi supports Windows MOBILE development

Which, I think … never!