Delphi for Win32 - Part 12 (One week of Delphi)

Well, how was my first week of Delphi 2007?

Overall, I'd say pretty positive. Did get a few deceptions on it not being perfect and still a bit far from it, but it turns out to be very stable once I know what not to do.

It's also sad to see some long lasting bugs remain, such as Error Insight not always working properly after a few hours coding and needing a restart of the IDE to be able to know some unit you have on your uses clause...

But, there are quite a few things that make up for that. And thus I get to my "5 favorite things" in Delphi 2007, as it seems to be customary! :)

So, here's the list and I'll explain a bit after:

1. QC Client bundled in;
2. Speed;
3. MSBuild;
4. Improved help;
5. Improved debugger.

Of these, I hope number 1 will no longer be there in a couple months! :)

Why these 5?

1. QC Client bundled in makes it easier for lazy people like myself to check QC and add new bug reports there; this in turn means more bugs found and more bugs fixed, so everyone wins.
2. Speed: kind of obvious no? Just to make it more clear, it's IDE launching speed, (re-)opening projects, even compiling: all faster and that saves me time in the long run...
3. MSBuild: I can finally press RUN and have my COM Add-in be compiled, linked, run the protective wrapper as a post-build task, launch the host app and presto: I'm debugging. No more "attach to running process" just because I need to run a protective wrapper after compiling...
4. Even though I've grown a bit unused of trying to look up things in help, this may change with Delphi 2007: generally, when I press F1 over something, it will open in the proper place without stopping to ask for useless options...
5. Being able to use dockable parts of the debugger so I can set it my way; getting rid of unwanted stuff like instruction opcodes because I don't need them most of the time and I can use the extra space (knowing I can always turn them back on). There was a sleuth of minor and not so minor things done to the debugger that really improved it.

I guess it's pretty clear I won't go back to any previous Delphi/BDS any time soon... :)

Let's hope that CodeGear does listen to their customers, learns from those things that did not work out very good this time and, above all, produces nice and quick fixes to the major annoyances so as to iron out the last few rough edges of Delphi 2007 and making it the best Delphi ever...