[DUG] Delphi XE (2011)

[David Brennan]

There are both positive and negative aspects that I see.

Obviously this release has less genuine "meat" in it than recent releases
which is a negative. Little in there excites us, although any further bug
fixes, performance/stability improvements, help improvements will be welcome
(probably the biggest thing we would see in this particular update - we are
only using Delphi 2007 but if we do make the jump across the Unicode barrier
then we will want the landing pad to be suitably robust!).

Positively though I would rather they recognise that it was foolish to think
they could do a strong cross compilation version in just one year and
postpone it a year (as it appears they have), than to have them release a
half baked dog which forever puts people off the Linux/OS-X support. 

Not that we could care less about Linux/OS-X support but I would rather have
Delphi being managed by a company which thinks of the future rather than
shipping incomplete rubbish (Delphi 8 anyone?) in order to suck in a bit
more money now at the cost of their future.

Back to the negatives, the biggest concern in all this is that it may mean
64bit gets pushed back by yet another year. Their roadmap shows 3 releases
before it says something along the lines of FULL 64bit support!

We don't actually need 64bit right now but the writing is on the wall and
soon, perhaps next month, perhaps next year, I can see something will come
up that requires us to build a 64bit exe and at that point we are going to
want it immediately and urgently. It appears a number of Delphi developers
have already hit that point and I can't help thinking they are bleeding more
customers (permanently!) for every year 64bit is postponed.

Cheers,
David.


-----Original Message-----
From: delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz] On
Behalf Of Jolyon Smith
Sent: Thursday, 19 August 2010 4:25 p.m.
To: 'NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List'
Subject: Re: [DUG] Delphi XE (2011)

My 2 cents:

The inclusion of (usable but limited versions of? - I think so, or that is
the impression I have) AQTime, FinalBuilder and CodeSite are to justify the
money-go-round of upgrade fees this year and to avoid cries of FOUL from the
SA subscribers, given that there is precious little else to justify the
money.

FinalBuilder in particular is if anything surely something of an
embarrassment, after making such a big deal of the inclusion of MS Build
technology (from 2007+ iirc).

Don't get me wrong, FinalBuilder is great (we use it ourselves).  We also
use AQTime, so the value of XE is of course significantly diminished in
those respects.

Similarly, we have zero interest in RadPHP, so zero value there (for us)
either.  [giving it away is probably the only way they have of shifting that
particular member of the RAD Studio family - distant cousin though it may
be]  ;)


As for the other things, the SVN client integration is, in some respects at
least, a step *backwards* from the already nicely integrated facilities
offered by TortoiseSVN and the Jedi JCL SVN IDE plug-in.


This release is not just disappointing but the way that the release has been
(mis)managed with the updated, confusing roadmap and the drip-feeding of
underwhelming features ... overall sadly I find little to be encouraged by,
let alone excited about, so far.

I can only hope that there is actually far more in XE than we have been
shown so far or than has been indicated we are going to be shown.

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