How hard is it to migrate a project from Delphi 7 to Delphi XE?

Question

Our company have a software that has been in development for over 10 years, so there are some really dated stuff in there. It\'s still quite functional and everything, but I see

Answer 1

I've been doing quite a few of those conversions.

You should prepare by making your current code base testable. Preferably using automated unit tests, but at least have a good end-user testing plan.

Then you should plan for the biggest portion: the Unicode conversion for both your app and your database.

Finally there are less major, but potentially very time consuming aspects:

• if you are using BDE, this is the time to get rid of it
• the Delphi XE is more strict than Delphi 7
• 3rd party library versions that bump up quite a few versions and are usually far less backward compatible than the VCL is

When you have ported it, it is time to change things: since you have seen the whole code base, now you know where your weak points are, so you can start refactoring them and get a better app than you had before.