Yesterday night I installed Windows 7 (64bit). And after 8 hours of installations I had everything installed and configured except Delphi. Today I had to decide what Delphi versions I want to install. And because Delphi 7 long outlived its lifetime and I didn’t want to go through all the problems that Delphi 7 has under Vista/Windows 7Â again, I decided against it. The next Delphi version was Delphi 8. No thanks. The same for Delphi 2005. And Delphi 2006 would have required me to install .NET 1.1 and it doesn’t give me any benefit. So it was also off the list. Now I had the Delphi 2007 installation DVD in my hands. Should I or shouldn’t I. I started the installer and while it was downloading the .NET 2.0 64bit framework I came to the conclusion that I have already migrated all my private projects to Delphi 2009/2010. That was the end for the Delphi 2007 installation and I proceeded with Delphi 2009 (*what a marathon if you start installing it from the RTM DVD) and then 2010.
That means that I stop supporting Delphi/C++Builder 5-2007. All my tools and units for those IDE versions remain on my page but no new version will be released for Delphi/C++Builder 5-2007. Sorry, but I have to move on.
Do you really believe that a software is better because of its higher version number? Delphi 7 is 5 times better than D2010.
I never wrote that. But I don’t have any project left in Delphi 7 or 2007. And without at least one project I don’t see a need to install them on my clean Windows 7.
And for the “5 times better”. I don’t think so. I have to work with Delphi 7 in my daily job and I love to come home and work in Delphi 2010. I don’t say that Delphi 2010 is the non plus ultra but it has its strong points, especially the new language features that now work much better than in Delphi 2009.
I didn’t run into any blocker in Delphi 2010 yet while I’m restarting Delphi 7 almost twice per hour. And because the days of our Delphi 7 development are counted I really see no need in working with it anymore. Actually I stopped using it at home when Delphi 2007 was released. I had it only on my computer because I never uninstall a Delphi version.
Needing to restart the Delphi IDE *that* frequently has always been a sign of a poor package that is installed rather than a poor quality IDE. I’m guessing that your Delphi 2009/2010 installs are much “cleaner” in that respect, hence they are – or appear to be – more stable.
Delphi 2007 is as rock solid for me as Delphi 7. Delphi 2009 less so – I have had the IDE disappearing down holes and locking up on me (with no additional party packages installed). Not frequently enough to be a problem, but noticeably more common than ever was the case with Delphi 7.
Delphi 2010 I have insufficient experience of so far (and so, I humbly suggest, do you).
However, I have just had my Delphi 2010 installation curl up in a ball and die as a result of a “corrupt” registration file. Upon attempting to re-register I am now told that my Serial # is invalid or expired. Two attempts to register, resulting in that error, never-the-less seem to have counted against the activation limit (3 of 10 – which tallies with 1 successful and 2 unsuccessful) for that serial number, and resulted in two downloadable “registration files” that do not actually activate the product, but NO download link to the previously successful registration.
As a result I can’t comment further on the stability of Delphi 2010 (at work) because I am simply unable to use at all the product that my employer paid for.
To be honest, I’m quite impressed that you took the burden of supporting all those Delphi versions in your hobby projects at all. Going back to pre-D2009 today would seriously limit my productivity (and almost the same applies to C++Builder).
Move on as you need to. I hope you enjoy it 🙂
(Btw, you wrote “the days of your Delphi 7 development are counted” – what are you switching to?)
Why not just install previous version in virtual machines ?
Rossen: It might be because time is limited and can be spent on useful things…. ? I have been working with Delphi since version 3, I would never EVER consider going back to any Delphi version below 2007.. there is simply no use in doing so, it’s just a waste of time for me to even try to get it installed in any virtual machine.. and I guess this is the same for Andreas.
Andreas: Gotta agree with Joylon that that degree of instability is probably not Delphi’s fault. Even D2006 wasn’t *that* bad IME.
Joylon: That’s odd. I don’t think I’ve ever had D2009 “disappear down a hole” on me. Never once. If only the compiler was as solid as the IDE, it would be darn close to a perfect product. From what I’ve seen so far, they did a pretty good job on improving the compiler in 2010, but the IDE stability’s down a little. Nothing horrible, but there are some issues that I didn’t see in 2009.
Hopefully D2011 will have both of them working well.
@Jolyon Smith: It’s not the Delphi 7 IDE that crashes. It’s the compiler that throws access violations and sometimes the “license is invalid” errors. And then you have to restart the IDE to get it working again. Interestingly I saw this “license is invalid” error only in Delphi 7. CodeInsight is also very slow and the IDE is thinking too long and sometimes it thinks after every key stroke. This all might be caused by the huge number of project files and lines of code, especially the auto-generated 6 MB large files (which can be cut in halve with the help of generics and would be even smaller with attributes => hint for Moritz Beutel). One day Delphi 7 works without any restart but the other day it seems to be better to go home and try it again the following day.
Mark, I’d like to see some *objective* evidence that D7 is 5 times better than D2010.
Back to the main topic.. I’m surprised you bothered installing D2009 since D2010 does all that D2009 does and more. Sure D2010 is not as stable as D2009 (we are using D2010 all day, every day at work) and there are issues with the editor (corrupting the edit buffer, mainly) and IDE that we never saw in D2009. We only have the TMS component pack installed as third party controls – nothing else. We do keep D2007 as the “other” IDE we still use — probably the most solid of the Delphi IDEs in our experience — we use this to build non-Unicode DLLs. We’d have stuck with D2007, but we find generics just so incredibly useful that we cannot do without them now (and we moved onto D2010 just to make sure we have all the generic bug fixes! — and more are still required — there is still far too much red underlining of fields and methods).
Gentlemen… Please, do not feed the trolls. Delphi 2010 is of course a couple of LIGHT YEARS ahead of Delphi 7. Only my grandma wouldn’t agree. Keep the good working on, Andy, and congrats for the move on (I envy you!).
Well,
I enjoyed your tools.
And fortunatelly, I just finally made the big jump.
From C++Builder 6 to 2010. And I can understand that you don’t want to support too old products. Because I waited myself ways too much and porting from 6 to actually, what is it?, version 13?, is too much of a harrasment.
Keep up the good work.
@Richard King: “corrupting the edit buffer, mainly”.
Have you installed my IDE Fix Pack for 2010 ? It should fix the “Undo destroys the editor buffer” bug. Or are those different bugs.
It’s a shame This is a area that open source could shine by providing additional support.
Oh well. I guess now that you have shown the way, if people really need the functionality to continue, it will just have to be reworked from scratch.
I do wish you could have continued with D2007 support, though I have started pushing hard to get my projects into the unicode world (a painful experience to say the least. The unicode implementation is quite a mess – still maybe the better IDE features will make it worth the pain)
Thanks for all your work giving us tools to make old IDE’s more usable, and sometimes correcting bugs that Borcandero should have done.
Anyway, it is too bad! Some folks (including me) are not going to upgrade soon. After the new “smart” Emb upgrade policy, I suspect that many just WON’T upgrade.
Best regards
I have to agree with @Xepol in that I wish you’d continue support with the last non-Unicode Delphi (2007). I have no need for all the hassle of going to a new Delphi version (don’t need Unicode, and don’t want to upgrade all my purchased libraries). The fact that each successive Delphi version (except 2006-2007) requires a completely new compiled library has put me off upgrading Delphi on a whim. It’s too much trouble, and since I am “only” a hobbyist programmer, it’s also way too expensive.
So I’ll stay on Delphi 2007 for some years yet…
There is simply no reason for upgrading. The Delphi 20xx IDEs are bloatware. I need a simple very very very slim IDE and a powerful compiler/RTL/VCL. Delphi 20xx is the opposite.
Thanks for your help in the ide of delphi 200x y delphi 7. I think about your option to leave all the ides and develop utils /patch only for delphi 2009 / 2010 and i think that you are wrong. Embarcadero all the years will change his ide but the people only change his ide every 3 or 4 years. Your utilities / patch are free for developers and i think that you must be support delphi 2007 too, but it’s your time, your ………. . Thanks for all.
Why not make it open source, so other’s can maintain it for older versions if they need it.
And we can also learn from the fixes you’ve made!
Thanks for all those years of making Delphi better.
I’m signing off, because I cant’t upgrade from Delphi 2007 ever.
We are using a lot of third party packages (some of them, we don’t have the sources) that weren’t upgraded to a higher version of Delphi.
We just want to maintain our software, no new developments.
I still believe the implementation of the multi-byte stuff was done poorly and should had have the option to turn it of.
Again thanks, and goodby.
Andreas,
Thank you for all of your effort and for working with Embarcadero to get at least some of your fixes rolled in to new Delphi releases.
In my opinion, it only makes sense for you to actively support versions of Delphi that you’re actually working with. Especially since this is you’re making everything available for free.
Please keep up the good work.
Delphi 7 is the only ide running on wine, and do ver well. That is the only reason to stay using it sometimes.
OTOH, thanks andrea for your amazinfg work. Im still in D2007, nothing attractive to put my money in D2009 or D2010, and not plan to migrate to unicode for the sake, no thanks.
Best regards.
Andreas
> Delphi 7 long outlived its lifetime
D7 still delivers great work, so I don’t agree with you really.
Thank you for supporting Delphi 7 up till now. I’m very sorry you feel the need to stop supporting D7 now that you have installed Windows 7.
I don’t blame you for your decision, but it does contribute a little to shrinking the Delphi world. Unfortunately, I can’t join you because the endless Windows upgrade treadmill is very tiresome, very expensive and rather unproductive for us.
In any event, the future of my company’s production environment lies with Linux, and XP virtualised for our accounting software and custom Delphi frontends. It looks pretty certain that XP will be the last Windows version we use; we certainly have no plans to change to Windows 7 anytime soon, if ever.
All the best, and thanks again
David
We recently had to support an old Win3.11 installation because that is what the industrial plant was set up on.
A colleague could do it with D7 and got the job.
Win7 is a worry because it no longer supports DOS. In WinXP we had drivers written to access the underlying hardware. Imagine telling clients they have to pay for a complete rewrite, just because Bill Gates decreed DOS is passé.
Industrial plants last much longer than Windows release cycles.
Thanks very much for all you do. I cannot imagine where you found the time in the early days!
Any possibility about opening the code to us ?
Just to learn how you do your magic and try help some way about the oldest version fixes ?
…Err…Make that D1…
Hi Andy. Sorry for OFF. My question again about DLangExtention for D2010. Which ToolsAPI interfaces exactly should we use to implement the DLangExtention preprocessor? We want to implement something like that.
The ToolsAPI doesn’t offer the required functions. I had to “hack” into the IDE to get what I needed.