Since then, Delphi 2010 passed me by without a great deal of interest, and now I find myself with even less enthusiasm for Delphi
(I also can't understand the naming convention. Although David I explained it last week, it isn't a convention that will scale. "X" for heterogeneous, and "E" for Embarcadero. What happens to the next version? It's like Microsoft coming up with Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 - absolutely no consistency in the naming convention and if you didn't know which was which, you wouldn't know what order they came in. Maybe that only matters to me.)
In any case, we have taken one decision that will make the Unicode transition to Delphi 2009 easier, and that is to drop our support for Crystal Reports in the next release of our product. We are currently tied to using Crystal Reports 7 (yes, really!) because it was the last version that a stable Crystal VCL for Delphi component was written for. Besides, the latest versions of Crystal Reports have dropped any support for native software developers, only now supporting VS.Net and Eclipse developers.
It does mean that I am having to rewrite over 250 standard reports in our preferred report designer, ReportBuilder from Digital Metaphors. But this product is now well embedded into our software, we provide the designer for users to write their own reports and we can access any part of the report at run-time in order to inject data security before the user sees the final report.
So one less unsupported component out of the way, and with ReportBuilder 12, we can also drop yet another third-party component that did some things that ReportBuilder wasn't able to do previously, but can now.
As a side note, over the past 6 months, I've come to totally rely on the Raize and TMS component sets, to the point now where I use them more than the standard VCL controls. The Raize ones just work well and look so good, and the TMS ones have so much functionality crammed into them; our users are really starting to see the benefit of good interface design.
Our company recently put out a call to customers for product testimonials in order that we could be considered for a software award; one word out of all of the responses pleased me the most about our software: robust.
6 comments:
I missed the fact that you had upgraded from Delphi 6 to Delphi 2009.
Out of curiosity, what would encourage you to upgrade?
Hi Bruce; sorry if I was unclear. I didn't say nothing since Delphi 6 encourages me to upgrade - I've bought Delphi 2009, we just actually haven't got round to porting the code over to it yet.
What I meant was that given that I've upgraded to D2009, I've not seen anything in D2010 or Delphi XE that would make me part with more money to upgrade from there.
I liked the Windows 7 stuff (taskbar, touch support) in D2010 but it wasn't enough to warrant an upgrade. What I've seen of XE so far is of zero interest to me.
64-bit is probably the one thing I'm getting asked most about at the moment by customers.
Jason,
When I re-read your post, your meaning was clear. It's my initial reading that was fuzzy. :)
On the bright side, if you've seen the roadmap, it looks like native 64 bit is scheduled for the release after XE.
Good post. We still use Delphi 6 in our product development (http://www.lenvica.in/content.php?page_name=products) which is already unicode enabled. The reason for not migrating is simple that the cost, effort & time to migrate.... We purchased licenses for D2005 but could not use it. By the time we planned, we saw D2007 hitting the market. Then D2009, D2010 is rolled out and the confusion continues which version to stick? it is not possible for a product company to change the development tool every year. One thing is sure in our agenda ... yes, one day we have to migrate. It may be D2010 :) Yes, D6 is too old now!
It's nice to read that so many developers are still on D6, because we're also still using C++Builder 6. I can't decide if I'm surprised.
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