I don’t think it’s “news” anymore that news of the Delphi (or RAD Studio) formerly known as “Weaver” is starting to appear “on the wires”. I shall not add to the plethora of links to the links to the articles that link to the videos which you’ve no doubt seen already – you can find your way there on your own without my help. Suffice for me to give my first impressions.
Just to be clear, this is impressions of the news released so far, not based on actual “hands on” experience. That said, it looks good. Very good in fact, although I’m getting a bit fed up of my VS colleagues saying ‘yeah, we’ve had that since…’” LOL
So, keeping things simple for a change lets quickly run down the headline features:
- “Yay” for the return of the old-style palette.
- “Boo” for the persistence of the nonsensical TLabel and TPanel icons.
- “Yay” for checkboxes on Boolean property values.
- “Boo” for not having applied that to the revised Project Options property sheets.
- “Yay” for thread debugging enhancements.
- “Yay” for “IDE Insight” – could be prettier though (but not worth Boo’ing over)
- “Yay” for custom debugger visualizations. Nope, no “Boo” here either.
- “Yay” for background compilation.
- “Boo” for being able to edit whilst compiling (hopefully that can be prevented, to avoid inadvertent cock-ups via some config option without disabling background compilation entirely)
That’s a lot of “Yay” and not so much “Boo”, and the “Yay”s are bigger than the “Boo”s anyway.
I for one am looking forward to getting my hands on 2010 and taking it out for a road test myself.
I’m also still hopeful that there’s more to come in terms of news of new features that were mentioned at Delphi Live!. Is it too much to hope that the extended RTTI and Tools API object model might have made it into Weaver, and that they’re holding back on telling us about that yet…. ?
First the IDE news, then language and compiler/RTL news… I hope…
Someone commented on this and mentioned that indeed some of those lower-level features I am hoping for have made it into Delphi 2010.
The poster expressed some concern that they may be breaking their NDA so I chose to remove their original comment and protect their identity. Hopefully the news will be broken officially soon and we can discuss some of the more technical features fully and without fear of reprisal.
🙂
@Paul – I don’t know what’s going on.
Comments appear to be broken at the moment. I approved your comment about the disappointment at the lack of delivery or even much concrete news w.r.t 64-bit and any updated roadmap (something I thought we were promised would be much easier now that CodeGear are no longer shackled by regulations applicable to publicly traded companies).
As I say, I approved your comment, and it showed up in my dashboard as an approved comment, but has now disappeared!
If someone else would like to comment on this article so that I can double-check the comments moderation system, I’d be grateful (my own comments don’t get moderated so don’t exercise that aspect of the site).
Jolyon – a few more words for you. I’d seen that my comment had disappeared into a black hole. Thanks for enlightening me…
I’m generally just get very annoyed with companies (and individuals) that make big noises about the future and then fail to live up to it. It’s also hard to be positive when their u-turns have direct consequences on our bottom line. However, we are where we are and if I weren’t a demanding, rabid 64-bit developer, I’d be saying the future of Delphi looks brighter than ever with the direction Embarcadero is taking it.
I do have doubts over the whole multi platform thing. I’ll have to defer to the experts on it, but hopefully they have learnt from Kylix and now have a correct balance of marketing and technical expectation to deliver products that the market wants. Undoubtably to me it is that which has caused the delays. I’d guess that the compiler rewrite is also long overdue with a lot of legacy weight to unravel.
As for D2010, even things like the old palette coming back as an option show they are listening to some degree. I’m quite happy with the new pallette, but equally if the old one makes it through to the 64bit product, I’d probably switch back. If you only use a very small subset of the 100’s of components, it seems easier to have them grouped together and at hand. I’d be hiding or removing all the stuff of no interest or use to us.
Time to write some code…
Paul.
Re your not liking the idea of editing during background compilation — I guess I don’t get why this is a big deal. If you have a problem with it, there’s an easy way to prevent it: don’t do it. “If it hurts,” and all that.
You do make a good point about not being able to find the compiler errors if you edited too much, and that’s why I probably wouldn’t use the “edit during compile” to do much more than delete commented-out code if I noticed it. But I’m not sure why it rates a “Boo”.
@Paul – no worries, and thanks for the follow up comments, many of which I agree with. I too personally see nothing of direct value (for me) in the cross platform ambitions, but if it helps establish a solid foundation for the future of Delphi, then I’m all for that! 🙂
I think I got to the bottom of the issue with comment moderation now, as you can see. 🙂
@Joe – yes, I know I can choose to edit files whilst doing a background compile, but I have a habit of forgetting what I *should* be doing, and tools are supposed to *help* in that regard.
So if I use background compilation I would rather my tool then *enforce* my preference of not being able to edit files, so that in a moment of weakness/distraction I cannot make a simple mistake of self control and then potentially find myself confused by some strange compilation error that doesn’t fit what I’m seeing on my screen.
But the tone of my comments was intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek. If nothing else you can equate my “Boo” on this point to the same “level of Boo” on the component palette icons.
i.e. it’s an imperfection, not necessarily a fatal flaw.
🙂