Delphi 2005 Architect Packs A Wallop (
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Delphi 2005 promises the best and smoothest transition from Win32 to .NET, as well as a host of UI improvements to boost programmer productivity on whatever platform you choose. But can it deliver?
Borland's Delphi 2005 promises a load of new and extended features. It has (take a deep breath, here:) support for C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The rapid application development environment has Win32 support for GUI, Web, database, modeling, and ALM. Yet, it's meant to stay familiar and comfortable to a loyal bunch of Delphi developers—of which I must count myself. Despite a few glitches, I'm glad to say that Delphi 2005 lives up to, or exceeds, my expectations.
Delphi 2005 is Borland's ninth entry of its flagship software development environment; the first edition was released in 1995 for Windows 3.1. I looked at the high-end "Architect" edition, but much of what I discuss applies to all versions. Delphi is no lightweight product, so any review is like a "21 Countries in 13 Days" tour of Europe, but I'll do my best to hit the highlights and observe the pitfalls in the next few pages. As your tour guide, I'll add an
observation at the end of each section.
Installation
Ordinarily, my reviews don't give that much attention to the installation, since you're likely to do it only once. However, there are a few idiosyncracies with this one that you might want to know about. I started out by installing Delphi 2005 on a Windows 2000 system running at 2GHz with 1GB RAM. About one hour, thirteen EULAs and a reboot later, I was almost ready to go. My initial attempts to use the product were disastrous; Delphi 2005 requires the latest patches to run properly on Windows 2000. (I generally don't patch without a good reason. Patching always causes something else on my Windows 2000 machine to break; in this case, the "upgrades" created a conflict between my mouse and I-Pen.)
Existing Delphi 7 users who are staying with the Win32 platform for the forseeable future should note that there is no installation of Delphi 2005 without .NET, no OS lower than the latest version of Windows 2000 is supported, and there have been no major improvements in Win32 support. (However, there have been some improvements which bring the Win32 compiler in-line with the .NET compiler, as we'll see.)
I also installed Delphi 2005 on a 3GHz system with 1GB RAM running Windows XP (SP1) machine, which took precisely 29 minutes and worked fine out-of-the-box. Of the thirteen EULAs noted, seven were .NET related, so if you're already doing .NET development, you should only have to ignore six of these. (Still, we've come a long way from the days of Borland's "No-Nonsense" license agreement, a single paragraph written in
plain English.)
Observation: You'll definitely prefer to use Delphi 2005 on a Windows XP system, as my patched Windows 2000 system was never as reliable as either of my XP systems. The requirements say Windows XP Professional is necessary; however, I ran on Windows XP Home without incident. Also, you'll prefer more RAM to a faster CPU; I had a lot more delays and disk-crunching out of my 3GHz/512MB machine than my 2GHz/1GB machine. Once started, Delphi 2005 tended to be in the so-fast-you-didn't-think-it-had-done-anything category.
First Impressions
Your first impressions of Delphi may not be overwhelmingly positive. It can take
considerable time to load—a minute or two. While somewhat off-putting, this is understandable: this is, in essence, three products: Delphi for Win32, Delphi for .NET, and MS's C# .NET
compiler. At least it was reasonably stable. You probably keep your development environment up all the time, as I do. While I did experience occasional exceptions on all test machines, few required restarting the environment.
Once up, Delphi 2005 will look familiar to any VS.NET developer. A main work area opens to a recent news/recent files page, a tool palette, an object inspector, and other tools locked into a full-screen window. You can, of course, detach any of the many panes or dock them to each other in any configuration you like. You can also put the IDE into a free-floating window mode (which is almost but not quite like pre-.NET versions of Delphi).
A slightly closer examination of the Tool Palette reveals a dizzying array of options. No less than eleven categories of options appear. (We'll look at them in a moment. ) I found myself collapsing and expanding the nodes in the default docked layout; with two panels open, items would go off the bottom of the page (at 1050 vertical resolution). Fortunately, the palette is easily customized.
In fact, everything in Delphi is easily customized. I didn't like many of the out-of-the-box settings, but Delphi encourages you to set things up however you want. Besides the VS-style default layout, it comes with the classic undocked layout mentioned earlier and a keen debug layout that sets up the call stack, watch list, and local variables windows on the left.
Observation: Higher resolution is better. Run at 1600x1200, if your eyes can take it. You needed a reason to get that 23" widescreen flat panel monitor anyway, didn't you?
Where Did You Say You Wanted To Go Today?
Now, you may be thinking, "Eleven categories? Are there that many things to do in the world?" More, actually. The categories loosely group most (but not all) of the things that the Delphi IDE can assist you with. Borland offers more ways to skin more cats than any one
person could need. Which means that there's some chance that Delphi offers the patricular way that you need to skin a particular cat.
To start with, Delphi 2005 provides all the options available in the Win32 versions of Delphi. The Win32 compiler has been brought up-to-date with the .NET compiler. This means that if you need to code—and debug!—for both platforms concurrently, you can. Of course, Delphi covers all the .NET angles: Web-based applications, component-building, WinForms—even AtoZed's stalwart Intraweb product (which is still one of the best ways to provide a Web-based interface that doesn't suck).
If that weren't enough (and, by gosh, don't you think it ought to be?), Delphi 2005 gives you all the same .NET project options using the C# language. You can use the Delphi IDE to program in other .NET languages as well. I played with the VB WinForm projects that were available in the default setup, but didn't really have time to investigate some of the more
tantalizing options (Python? Eiffel? Smalltalk? What fun!).
Observation: If you need it done, Delphi can do it. Unless it's Java.
