Delphi 2010

The last version of Delphi I bought was Delphi Professional 2006. I didn't rate at all. Buggy, slow, broken help... sigh... I felt the days of Delphi were over. That and Kylix (stagnating at V3.0) and the change of hands of "CodeGear".

Delphi 2007, 2009... finally 2010

After an initial false start (see earlier posts), I managed to get Delphi 2010 Architect trial to install. I wasn't expecting much but...

• Generics
• RTTI access methods
• Attributes

Interesting... ah, but...

• Broken help (no news there, then)
• Still have to declare variables outside a function/procedure
• Still circular uses dependency restriction

I did a comparison with a C# app. While I find the C# language easier to work with, Delphi runtime is a lot faster. A simple graphical app seemed sluggish in .NET but rapid in Delphi.

The biggest area of Delphi is not so much the IDE, the documentation or the language, but the VCL. Standard tree control in WinForms doesn't support multiple selection - in VCL it's an option.

The price of upgrading to Delphi 2010 Professional is about £340 - that's not cheap compared to previous versions. They're offering BOGO at the moment, so I took the plunge and bought Delphi 2010 Pro upgrade and BOGO'd a copy of C++ Builder 2010 Pro as well.

After my two year break from Delphi going back is a bit traumatic. C# has spoilt me with the depth of the language. Delphi feels... antiquated.

C++ Builder never impressed me much. Everything I threw at it had problems. Seems this time it has improved, so maybe there's hope yet!