Installation

Installation is involved, of course, with about a gigabyte worth of tool dumped on your hard-drive — more, if you're not up-to-date with all the latest .NET stuff, of course. I had to go through afterwards and turn off things like SQL Server and Interbase server, which are helpfully installed and automatically activated during Delphi installation. It would have been nice to have these be presented as options rather than surreptitiously installed.

I should note here that I did one installation and a lot of testing on a laptop with a mere 512MB of RAM. This made me somewhat hypersensitive to the bulkier/laggier parts of DX.

Firing up the old gal was considerably faster than Delphi 2005 (D9). Also, though it may seem petty, the start-up screen looks a lot better than the last version's. You may still get the impression that ten pounds of crap are being shoveled into a five pound box, but at least it's a nice-looking box.

If you want an even faster startup, and you know what you're going to be developing for, you can use the specific start-ups for Win32 development, for .NET development, or for C# development. (A C++ Builder was also included, and this has since been fully upgraded to a working version available at Borland.com.) DX also started new projects quicker and with less thrashing than the other major .NET development environment.

The IDE and GUI Editing

The IDE has a more polished look than D9, though I can't quite place my finger on why. There are some nice, subtle changes in the editor (covered below) and it defaults again to the VS-style look. I never could manage to make it emulate D7's classic component-bar configuration. It's not that the old horizontal-tab version was so great, but the vertical orientation doesn't work for me at all. The more components I have, the more likely I am to want to browse them, and you have to do a lot more scrolling with the vertical form.

It's not all bad news: the tool palette is quite keyboard-friendly. If you know what you're looking for, you can switch the palette with Ctrl+Alt+P then type in the first few letters and the palette will filter. Also, the palette is context sensitive, so that when you're looking at the form designer, you see components you can place on the form, where as if you're writing source, you see components for creating specific sorts of source files.

As Delphi has evolved, it has, of course, gotten more and more complicated in terms of layout. I've always preferred the detached-SDI layout of classic Delphi to the MDI-ish feel of Microsoft products, and that's still available here. However, with five windows plus the main menu open during most development, it doesn't really make much sense anymore. DX keeps things clean, clearing the message window when it's not needed. Though the real beauty here is how little the message window is needed (which I'll talk about more in the Text Editing section below).

DX's GUI builder demonstrates subtle changes that can make a big difference in your UI design by introducing “dynamic alignment guides”. These helpful little lines stretch out from the control you're placing to nearby controls to show how things align. Not just the edges of controls, but the position of text inside the controls, which gives your UI “clean lines”. As someone who has been known to use align features and be unsatisfied with the result, I found this improved the appearance of even my quick-and-dirty forms immensely.

Connecting a data table in MySQL to an ASP.NET Web page.

Borland also introduces “design guidelines” which at first simply seemed to be a little tooltip window showing the X,Y coordinate of the control. But if you give margins to your forms, a line pops up showing you where those margins are as you move the component around. This was also (literally and figuratively) neat, though it didn't grab me the way the “dynamic alignment guides” did.

Even less interesting to me was the addition of the “form positioner.” This allows you to specify where your form will appear on the screen when your app starts. Maybe people were clamoring for this. It struck me as a bit frou-frou. There are also two new components that emulate a web-like approach to form design.

Anyway, all this stuff may seemminor, but the energy devoted to making tasks easier and making the final product better is a big part of what makes working with Delphi a joy.