[DUG] Delphi 2006 and 2007 - Accredo etc

[David Brennan]

BTW, Developer Express have decided to drop support for Delphi 5 in future
releases. Since they provide a large chunk of our third party components
that pretty much confirms we will be upgrading to Delphi 2008 when it comes
out...


-----Original Message-----
From: delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz] On
Behalf Of David Brennan
Sent: Wednesday, 5 September 2007 2:18 p.m.
To: 'NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List'
Subject: RE: [DUG] Delphi 2006 and 2007 - Accredo etc

Thanks for the reply Paul (and Steve and Rohit).

I'm not too concerned about the VCL controls because we use 3rd party
controls or our own code for most things.

IDE stability, usability and functionality are my main concern at present.
Most of the D2007 complaints don't appear to be about that (although was a
strong background of grumbling about speed/crashes/etc in D2005 and to a
lesser extent 2006 I think).

Here's hoping that D2008 is a further improvement on D2007 in all areas. By
the fourth iteration of their new interface you would certainly hope it
would be good!

BTW, we haven't switched from Delphi 5 because switching takes time, can
introduce bugs and we have no good reason to. There have been a sprinkling
of new language features which might have been of interest but on their own
they haven't been enough to force the change (although the refactoring
features made me consider it carefully). Most of the other new functionality
in the later Delphi versions seems to have been new controls, new ways of
data access, etc which weren't very relevant to us as we are already happy
with what we do.

The drivers to finally switch to Delphi 2008 will be:
  - Significant new language features - ie Generics
  - Improved IDE coding support such as refactoring - although I won't know
how useful this is until we use it in anger.
  - ReportBuilder hasn't supported Delphi 5 for a while... which hasn't
worried me but we need to catch up with the latest version of Report Builder
sooner or later
  - Delphi 5's quirks (including a few crash bugs) seem to be worse on Vista
and we have one poor soul developing on Vista just so we have some
background testing on Vista.

We'll probably go for Software Assurance this time and keep in sync... so
Richard, if there are any good pricing deals going around before Delphi 2008
comes out then let us know!

David.




-----Original Message-----
From: delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz] On
Behalf Of Paul Heinz
Sent: Wednesday, 5 September 2007 1:29 p.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: RE: [DUG] Delphi 2006 and 2007 - Accredo etc

David asked: 

> Some of these problems can probably be put down to the user 
> being used to doing things one way and frustrated at having 
> to do them another way (particularly if the new way isn't 
> easy to work out). However some of the problems sound like 
> they could be more serious in that the new functionality is 
> noticeably worse than it was in Delphi 5-7.
> 
> I gathered from the below post that Accredo have moved to 
> Delphi 2006. I imagine there are some other reasonable sized 
> development teams which have moved up to Delphi 2005-2007.
> 
> So... how have Accredo and other similar development teams 
> found it? How many gotcha's really are annoying rather than 
> just a change in the way things work?

> My interest is obviously that we are still using Delphi 5 
> (despite owning various newer copies as well). I'm still 
> planning on moving forward when Delphi 2008 comes out but I 
> am a little concerned...

Firstly, we essentially upgraded for the IDE improvements and BDS 2006
was initially unusable due to not being able to handle projects the size
of Accredo so it wasn't until Update 2 (or later - I can't remember
exactly) that it became viable. They obviously had some nasty O(n
squared) algorithms in there (where n is number of project elements). 

Also, remember that we use all our own GUI controls and TDataset layers,
so most of the various VCL gremlins that others are finding don't affect
us. And that's one of the reasons we use our own stuff - quality of
implementation is in our hands, we're not relying on anyone else not to
let us down.

To be fair, we did have to do some component work initially to resolve a
couple of low level VCL changes and to work with the IDE package
cacheing and deferred loading but that wasn't too painful once we got to
the bottom of it.
 
> It sounds like the Help system making gigantic leaps back 
> between Delphi 7 and 2005+ is one annoying gotcha. What else?

Well, firstly I'm still mainly working in Delphi 7 since I'm maintaining
the current release codelines, whilst the other members of the team are
working using BDS 2006 on our next release development codelines but
with the odd bit of pair programming I've done - the new IDE has some
nice features and improvements in the debugger which I consider very
valuable.

(Sidenote: IMO, debugging is harder than coding, so if you write overly
'clever' code that is at the limit of your coding ability or
comprehension ability, you may find it outside your ability to debug!)

But yes, I do feel the Delphi help has been limping along getting very
little love from Borland/Inprise/Codegear for years, BDS 2006 is just
the latest iteration of this trend. 

And that's largely a management priority/resource allocation issue.
Historically, I don't think Borland has put much importance on the
Delphi help. But that's been true of Delphi as a whole product too -
what resources Delphi has been allocated when into the features, not the
documentation, which is a common oversight in todays marketing driven
world.

New features on the tick list produce more sales (generally) , you only
find out what the product is really like (documentation, etc) after
purchase. It's called post-purchase evaluation in the traditional
marketing model of the customer buying process.

So, speaking with my cynical marketing hat on, features are more
important than documentation if you want sales now and are thinking
short term since you're not sure you want to invest more in the
product's future.

Now, to be fair that's more the old Borland, whereas CodeGear do seem to
be trying to change this (finally!) but it takes quite a bit of time and
effort to execute on a new vision and turn any organisation bigger than
2 people around...

Time will tell...

TTFN,
  Paul.

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