What are major incentives to upgrade to D2009 (Unicode excluded)?

Question

I\'m a hesitant upgrader when it comes to development tools. For roughly half of my product I still use D7, and for others D2006.

The truth is, although Unicode supp

Answer 1

As steve said, the major language additions are a big plus. But there is an other thing.

Delphi had been in stormy weather the last years. And that was reflected by the versions. 7 was the last good version, 2006 was reasonable, but still below average. But now with 2009 a new era has started. Delphi has found a new home. And the focus is back on being the best development tool there is. There is still some backlog that needs to be solved, but as far as I am concerned Delphi is back on the way up.

Answer 2

Nick Hodges posted:

Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade From Delphi 7

They include:

1. Live Templates
2. History Tab
3. Dockable/Customizable IDE
4. VCL Designer Guidelines
5. New Tool Palette
6. Refactoring
7. Generics
8. Anonymous Methods (Closures)
9. Unicode Support
10. Ribbon Controls

In his Conclusion he said: "the hardest part about writing this article was limiting it to only ten"

and then he lists 24 other things (not counting Intellimouse twice).

Answer 3

I just gave the Generic Collections and the enhanced For-loop a spin (don't mind the visual ugliness of the code (e.g. if-then-else on one line)):

program genericTList;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  SysUtils,
  Generics.Collections;

var
  myList : TList<string>;
  s: string;

begin
  myList := TList<string>.create;
  try
    myList.Add('Peter');
    writeln('Inviting Peter');
    myList.Add('Barbie');
    writeln('Inviting Barbie');
    if myList.Contains('Bob') then writeln('Bob has managed to sneak in...') else writeln('Bob is not invited!');
    writeln('List of invited people:');
    for s in myList do writeln(s); //feels sooo goood X-)
    readln;
  finally
    FreeAndNil(myList);
  end;
end.

After three years of staying away from Delphi, which seemed dying back then, I think I might return to this lovely world.

My greatest Delphi project seems to suffer from not being Unicode-ready, but Unicode is great stuff too, so I'll just have to fix the code in few places. Yesterday I also managed to get it to build and execute without errors (seems there was some sort of D2007->D2009 transition trickery involved) and I noticed that D2009 is just EXCELLENTLY FAST! It's better than the older versions in (almost*) every aspect.

*I have not found regressions YET.

Answer 4

The by far most important incentive to me was the overall speed of the IDE in comparison with Delphi 2006 and the same project.