PNW Delphi Users Group - Coding in the Northwest

Speed

Is your favorite IDE Delphi 7?   Why?  Speed by chance?  if you've worked in Delphi 2005 or BDS-2006, you may have noticed some performance speed degradation, especially if you have a number of third party components.  

Again... The gang at CodeGear listened and made some major improvements to the speed of the IDE.  They've made some changes in the tools used for their IDE that have made some dramatic improvements.  On my 2 Gig Core 2 Duo Vista Ultimate, I was able to go from "nodding to coding" in about 15 seconds with factory components.  On subsequent warm restarts of the IDE, the time was down to 5-6 seconds.  This is a MAJOR improvement CodeGear.

The response in the coding editor appears to also have benefited from this improvement.

Stability

Hmmm.   Well...   It has to crash for me to see it being unstable. It has been very solid.  Even with about 30 third party packages, I see a more stable IDE than in the past.  And this is without some "tweak" products like DelphiSpeedup (which has been a great tool). 

[updated 03/14/2007] Another attack by the development team has been addressing a number of memory leaks in the IDE itself. This helps solidify the development session and minimizes any grief.

IDE

[updated 03/14/2007] The of the annoying things in Delphi 2006 dealt with the flicker of the IDE for certain portions of the IDE.  You'll be happy to see this change in Delphi 2007 to improve your development cycle.

Documentation

Delphi 7 was great, face it.  Select a component or a piece of code, press F1 and see the help in a fast and usually informative manner.  When the newer IDE's came out, they incorporated Microsoft's HTML2 Help system, which is what Visual Studio has incorporated with the MSDN library. All of a sudden, pressing F1 became an adventure.  This is one of my major complaints about the newer Delphi's.  When I need info, I want context sensitive help that is relative. 

Delphi 2007 for Win32 has dramatically taken a turn for the better.  They have done some major, major overhauling of the help for the new Delphi.  You can select TMEMO from the component palette, press F1 and.... guess what...   Hey... That help topic is on TMemo.   What a concept!

CodeGear has added a number of example code and continues to add more into the help. Sections of the help have been improved in terms of how to create components and use the IDE.

[Updated 3/14/2007] CodeGear switched their help building system to Doc-O-Matic, according to CodeGear during a CodeRage session on their new help system. With changes and additional material added to the Delphi 2007 help content, the builds for the help take upward of three hours. Also mentioned was an effort to establish a perpetual style build system to allow updates to be readily available for product updates.

Would I say that the new help is perfect?  No. Then again, I have yet to see what I would term "perfect help". But CodeGear has made the right moves in structuring the help and designing it in a way that will allow them to continue to build on and improve their help in updates and future upgrades.  But it is a MAJOR step forward.

[Updated 3/14/2007] Those looking for the thick manuals that come with their shipped package will... well... have to keep looking. During a Q and A session during CodeRage, CodeGear pretty much related what is becoming common practice in software delivery and leaving the documentation in electronic format.