PNW Delphi Users Group - Coding in the Northwest

If you Build it... They will Come

Another major change in Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the new support for MSBuild.  What is MSBuild?  Its a new platform that was introduced on the new Visual Studio products that provides a new platform to building applications and managing processes, that is independant of the language.  It is XML based and is simple to understand and easy to extend.

Delphi 2007 for Win32 provides a pre and a post build event section which provides you the ability to run MSBuild related features or simply run batch files.

This is a great addition.  One thing that you could do is add a post build event that would compress the build using UPX or similar compression/protection tool and then run the code signing of the build.

[updated 03/14/2007] Also to note is multiple configurations for Release and Debug builds, further extending the muscles of Delphi 2007.

[updated 03/14/2007] For those using FinalBuilder to automate your Delphi builds, you will be happy to know that FinalBuilder is planning to add support for Delphi 2007.  One of the great things, though, is that since FinalBuilder supports MSBuild already, you can actually automate your Delphi 2007 builds right away.

VCL for the Web

I haven't personally done a lot with using Delphi on the web, but new to Delphi 2007 for Win32 is a component set called VCL for the Web.  This is actually Intraweb version 9. Intraweb helps create weblications.  According to AtoZed Software, "A Weblication is a web application. Building a weblication is very different from building a web site, and IntraWeb is the first and only tool specifically geared towards creating weblications. This allows you to build weblications faster and easier. Based on a powerful HTML rendering engine, IntraWeb allows developers to design weblications in the same way as they would normal Windows applications. Using a drag and drop approach, developers can drop controls on forms (which can be thought of as a combination between HTML pages and forms), create  events and set properties. The code behind the application is pure C#, Visual Basic, Delphi, C++, or Java, and does not require any knowledge of HTML or JavaScript."

Part of the new VCL for the Web support includes support for AJAX, which allows your applications to move towards Web 2.0.

Database Development

CodeGear has released a new database architecture called DBX4 database. The design and architecture streamlines the database connectivity.  Support for the most recent versions of SQL databases, including MySQL 5.0 is given. The DBX4 is a single compatible native and managed code database infrastructure that simplifies the writing of data drivers and supports connection pooling.

Delphi 2007 for Win32 adds support for MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 as well as Interbase in its Professional edition. The Enterprise edition adds support for 10g, MS SQL Server 2000/2005, Informix 9x, IBM DB2 8.x and Sybase 12.5.