[DUG] Impressions on D2005

[James Sugrue]

G’day all, thought I’d share my initial impressions of Delphi 2005.   (Machine Specs HP NX9010 Laptop, 512 ram, 40gb 5400rpm, WinXP)   I have been using it to do legacy Win32 code and C#. I haven’t used the Delphi.NET side yet, and in all honesty probably wont.   Installation:   I had read a few horror stories on the Newsgroups about installation, but I had no trouble. Installation took about 25mins, including the prerequisites. One caveat here is that I have VS 2003 installed, so most of the pre-reqs where already installed.   Loading:   Initial loading took about 1 minute, and subsequent loading takes about 45s. This is considerably slower than Delphi 7, but it is loading all the “personalities”. Apparently you can turn of the ones you don’t use, but I haven’t bothered.   IDE:   I like the new IDE. It seems quite snappy on my machine and a vast improvement over Delphi 8 and about the same as Delphi 7. I like the new refactoring features. I have used them quite a bit on some legacy apps that had some really ugly code that I never got around to fixing. Refactoring makes this a breeze. I also like the auto history feature, although haven’t had to use it yet, I can see where this would come in handy.   The code-complete and parameter suggestion features in the new IDE are nice, they come up quite snappily on my machine, although I would imagine on slower machines this could cause a problem, it brings up the code complete and another box with parameter help and brief overview of the method or whatever.   Converting Legacy Apps:   I have a couple of legacy apps that have a few 3rd party components used in them. Luckily I have the source to all the components, so converting them to Delphi 2005 wasn’t much of an issue. Most of them pretty much installed straight away, if not it just need slight modifications to get to run. I was expecting this to be a headache, but proved to be pretty painless. I have components from the old TurboPower ( Orpheus, Async Pro, Shell Shock ), Woll2Woll InfoPower 4000, and Quick Report 3.06 and they all installed pretty much out of the box, or with only slight changes.   C#:   I like the new C# personality and quite like .NET in general. The Delphi version compares favorably with Visual Studio and the apps seem to be a bit snappier, especially when doing data access, however this is just seat of the pants and I might be imagining it.   A major problem, which is almost a showstopper, is that (Pro anyway) ADO support is limited. You can use ADO, but you cant do things like visually configure Data Adapters, or Datasets. You also don’t seem to be able to add new ADO Data Adapters etc either.   Stability:   The IDE seems relatively stable, although there are a few strange error messages that happen out of the blue every now and then, such as it cant find a particular .BPL, even when I am in C# and not using that component, and bringing up the form designer in both C# and Win32 Delphi is very slow. I’m talking about 1-5s to bring up a form at times.   Conclusion:   Overall, I’m pretty impressed so far with D2005. I do quite a bit of .NET and Win32 so it is the obvious choice for me. If I was only doing Win32 then the new languages features and things like refactoring and code history and the new IDE would probably be enough for me to upgrade, however I only use Pro so the $400 odd it cost to upgrade the maintenance was a no brainer. If I was upgrading Enterprise or Architect then I might have reservations.

_______________________________________________
Delphi mailing list
Delphi@ns3.123.co.nz
http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi