The road to Delphi 2009 - Part 1

OK, so I started with the easy stuff. Installing third-party components.

Raize Components - Check
TMS Component Pack - Check
ReportBuilder Enterprise/Server - Check

OK, these were easy because they were designed for Delphi 2009.

ODBCExpress - Oh. Well, according to its lead developer Pieter Myburg on the support newsgroup, "we have stopped active development of ODBCExpress, and we won't be porting it to future versions of Delphi ourselves".

The last support was for Delphi 2006 which, as I understand, compiles fine in Delphi 2007 as that was a non-breaking release. But not Delphi 2009, oh no. So if anyone out there has any experience with bringing this component set up to Delphi 2009, I would love to hear from you. Without this, we're stumped. It'd be a case of going back through 10 years of software and rewriting it to use dbExpress or ADOExpress. And I seriously don't think we can afford that time.

By the way, bearing in mind I have come from Delphi 6 and have only seen screenshots of the IDE from Delphi 2005 onwards, I really like the IDE. Although I seem to have less code editing space because of all the other (really very useful) palettes that surround it.

Bit the bullet: Delphi 2009!

So, I finally bit the bullet and purchased a Delphi upgrade, to D2009. The offer was too tempting and I have started to become frustrated with being left too far behind with Delphi 6.

Thanks to one of the distributors in the UK, Grey Matter, we got the D2009 upgrade for 20% off. This was a promotion they were running for those who didn't want to take advantage of June's "Buy Delphi and get RAD Studio free" promotion. Apart from a slight, but only curious interest in Delphi Prism, there wasn't enough to tempt me, in these economic times, to not take the 20% off instead.

And so I will chronicle my journey to take our 10 year old product, written in Delphi 5 then Delphi 6, to Delphi 2009. The challenges I forsee are more to do with API headers written for some of the hardware devices (clocking terminals) that we support with our T&A product, but time will tell.

To start with, it will be a case of getting the main part of the software converted and see how that goes. I have the latest versions of all our third-party products such as Raize Components 5, TMS Component Pack, ReportBuilder Server & Enterprise 11 and TsiLang Translation.

Could have some fun with older components like the Crystal Reports VCL component for Delphi (for Crystal Reports 7). Anyone got any experience with that?

Should be "interesting"...!

Upgrading a major project to Delphi 2009

Lars Dybdahl has posted an excellent summary of his experience converting older Delphi projects to Delphi 2009. Very relevant to me and many Delphi users, I'm sure:

Compas Pascal: Upgrading a major project to Delphi 2009: "g"