Live blogging from Allen's talk

Monday, September 13, 2004 10:01 AM

In the spirit of live blogging, here are my notes from Allen Bauer's "What's new in Delphi" talk.

Allen is focusing on IDE features. As he notes, this release of Delphi is about making the developers productive. There are new features in a lot of areas - designers, editors, debuggers, and refactoring.

The Galileo IDE supports multiple personalities: Delphi for Win32, Delphi for .NET, C#. Note: this means nothing in regard to the actual SKUs. Allen makes it clear - the engineers are allowed to talk about anything in the product, except SKUs, release dates, and product names.

New debugging features:

• Win32 and .NET debuggers working simultaneously (for example, debug a Win32 client for a .NET Web service and the Web service itself at the same time).
• Debugging .NET code hosted in a Win32 process.
• AppDomain support in the Module view.
• Better stack traces in Win32.
• Locals view - see local variables in stack frames (during a stack trace).
• Improvements to the exception notifications.
• Breakpoints improvements - in-place editing, enable/disable using a checkbox.
• IL disassembly view.
• Full SSE support.
• Unicode-enabled view.
• Better IIS debugging.

Refactoring:

• Rename identifier (works even within a project group, including projects that contain both Delphi and C# code). This is based on the actual uses clause, not just what's listed in the project group.
• Extract method
• Extract resource string
• Sync Edit (like JBuilder - text replacement in a pure lexical fashion, works within a selected block)
• Find unit or namespace
• Declare field
• Declare variable
• C# and Delphi (Win32 and .NET)

Good news for long-time Delphi developers - the floating designer is back for VCL and VCL.NET. Lots of people liked this. The designer now supports drag-and-drop from the palette, like the WinForms designer.

Another improvement is the Structure view - an extension of the object tree view which includes a lot more information, so it's useful in more modes. Memorable quote: "The JBuilder guys stole a lot of things from Delphi - it's their turn to get ripped off."

Allen's showing off Corbin's new and improved tool palette, with features such as filtering, customizable categories, button sizes, and color schemes.

Other cool features:

Help Insight - displays (in HTML) information about a symbol, based on XML documentation, including Microsoft's documentation, and the hyperlinks actually work.

History tab - keeps a history of changes. The number of versions is configurable. This is useful even if you use a source control system, because you don't always check in every little change. You can even see the difference between a version of the file and the (unsaved) editor buffer.

Finally, the IDE startup time will be improved. The R&D team are going to spend some time just on performance.