Well, one day after I finally was able to download and install Delphi 2007 (thanks go to DavidI and Michael Swindell for their help in speeding up the process), I must say that it's not what I'd think it would be!
When waiting for the manual ESD ordering process (involving wire transfers, e-mails back and forth, waiting what seemed like an eternity just because Portugal is "one of those countries" where we can't order CodeGear products online and have that "instant gratification"), I thought that I would be spending my first day with Delphi 2007 exploring all the new features...
I thought, because I didn't! And why? Well, a couple Access Violations on the new IDE even before adding any third-party tool and without having BDS 2006 on my system anymore, made me wonder if Delphi 2007 was indeed that more stable than BDS 2006 which had not crashed on me for so many months that I can't remember when it was the last time!
One such violation was when removing the Office XP automation and installing the Office 2K automation instead as one of the component sets I use requires that version instead (yes, Delphi 2007 is using a "Vista" approach: "We know better than you what you like, so we don't ask you and install what we decide!").
This AV was a bit drastic as it kept poping up and I had to forcefully end-task the IDE.
The other AV was after restarting the IDE and when trying to add some other components, so it may have been those components fault.
So, in order to set things straight, I decided to go back to an old ghost image of my C: drive with only Windows, Office and updates.
I had saved the cache folder where the Delphi installer downloads the files, and made it into an ISO. Mounted that ISO, fired the install, only to find out that it would go download .NET 2.0 Framework: a quick check and, ok, let it go on as I don't have that installed. However, when it started trying to download all the other files it already had on the ISO, I aborted it and instead copied all the remaining files to the folder the install expects them to be in. (Hint for CodeGear: some instructions on how to make this into a DVD would be nice!)
It all went ok and when I ran Delphi 2007 and did the same operation as before it no longer crashed. So, now I was facing the task of re-installing a ton of utilities that I use, from UltraEdit to WinZip and many others, so, instead of doing it, I decided it was time to find a way to make them "install-less" and place them on sub-folders of my D:\Utils so I would save myself some work on my next installs. And so that was my first day with Delphi 2007!
I'm pretty happy with how much leaner my system looks and feels with my Start Menu so much less cluttered (not that I use it anyway!), and above all, my registry not being flooded with tons of useless information. So, at this point, and having gone back to my previous ghost image again to verify that all the utils were in fact working properly on a "clean" image, I'm now about to install Delphi 2007 for the third time. I already took some notes on the install process and some minor (and some not so minor) issues, and that will be the subject of my next post...
Overall, some times bad things come for good and having Delphi 2007 blow up on me at the start made me clean up my dev system, so that's some good out of that!
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