Malcolm was saying that there were only a few big items in Delphi 2010. The touch/gesture support feature is probably the main one, whereas Delphi 2009 had Unicode, Generics, Anonymous Methods, etc.
But instead they added lots and lots of little new features to improve the IDE and debugging. For some people these will count as big features - for example the new Data Visualiser support could be HUGE for us assuming it is relatively easy to write your own (and the capabilities are flexible enough) as it would allow us to browse our custom data structures much more easily during debug time. It sounds like all these features do a lot to bring the Delphi IDE up to true world class level. That's pretty important to me so Delphi 2010 sounds very worthwhile to me. They also fixed a lot of bugs. Presumably these bug-fixes are not going to be ported back to previous versions. I accept that and am simply happy that they have now fixed these bugs and I hope they keep fixing more bugs in subsequent versions. I know other people have a less tolerant view (possibly people who are encountering more of these bugs in their older versions!). So as Jolyon says the reality is somewhere in between and will depend a bit on what you personally value. FWIW I would love to be able to use Delphi 2010 but I don't see it happening any time soon because I think testing and adapting to Unicode is going to be too big a project for us to justify in the next 6 months or more, possibly indefinitely until we get a customer who absolutely must have Unicode (we could do it more easily by just leaving our database string fields as ansistrings but that really defeats the purpose - sounds like most of the pain with none of the gain). Sigh. David. From: delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz] On Behalf Of Jolyon Smith Sent: Friday, 16 October 2009 3:17 p.m. To: 'NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List' Subject: Re: [DUG] Has Malcolm Groves Been Misrepresented? I also went on - in a subsequent comment - to say that things that Malcom didn't seem to consider were that big, *were* in fact very noteworthy and worthwhile additions, imho. I think the actual position is somewhere between the two views. i.e. Delphi 2010 *is* more than just a "bug fix", but it's not as *major* a release in terms of headline features that 2009 was, for example. Perhaps Malcolm simply didn't express that particularly well in Auckland. (there's a danger that since people often complain that bugs don't get fixed, attention is then drawn to "how many bugs we fixed" which then distracts away from "how much of, and how big, the new stuff is" - I was commenting on the perception that I felt Malcolm conveyed, not agreeing that that perception was necessarily correct). I myself was perhaps not clear enough on that point (the observations were in comments, not a blog post - I spend more time on posts than on comments) From: delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-boun...@delphi.org.nz] On Behalf Of Paul A Norman Sent: Friday, 16 October 2009 2:59 p.m. To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List Subject: [DUG] Has Malcolm Groves Been Misrepresented? I was not at the Auckland presentation, and have had to rely on others' reporting of it. Jolyon who normally appears to be very careful in what he says and writes has said on his blog: "Malcolm Groves stood up in Auckland and openly told us that in his view, apart from 1 or 2 things, and really in *his* opinion only 1, Delphi 2010 was basically a bug fix release with lots of little tweaks here and there. They charged full price for it of course and won't be retrofitting those bug fixes to Delphi 2009 or 2007 (where they would be of most use). "I stress - that's not my characterisation of the release as not delivering much in the way of "new stuff", it was his. "David" wrote on Jolyon's blog: "While I usually agree with you Jolyon I don't feel Malcolm Groves told us Delphi 10 was mainly just bug fixes. What he did say was that there were only one or two big killer features but there were hundreds of small improvements. Some of these small improvements were no doubt bug fixes, but many are enhancements and new features which from the sound of it really improve the IDE." Please, Jolyon, David and any one who was there, what is what? -- Because like a lot of people, my decisions on ongoing use and purchase of Delphi very much depends on whether you have to factor in the next version as a paid for bug fix or not, on what you buy. Paul
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