1st Impressions on Embarcadero Delphi XE2 - Part 2

Though tomorrow is Christmas Day, i could not hold back and just turned on my workstation to play with my gift. 

Running again Delphi XE2, a notification showed up that Update 3 is available for download. It took a while to complete but i have to notice that all installation steps so far completed very smooth, despite the big amount of programs and features that installed. That is very nice and gives me confidence for the future.

Ok, Delphi XE2 pinned to start menu, let’s start discovering the new development environment.

Checking Installed packages and what is available for download. QuickReports & FastCube are available for download. For the first I will need it in order to convert my previous apps due to the extensive usage I had done, and I even derived some of these to suit my needs.

ADO DB is installed so normally I will not any problem. As for other components I will check on the go.

Looking at Help, “What's New in the Help, and Where is Everything” it says I must take a “Tour of the IDE”. It is comprehensive presentation of the IDE features and finally I found out what the “Structure View” window is (see my 1^st post), it is the Object Treeview from past versions of Delphi. Also “History Manager” and the Subversion integration is a very usefull new feature that “lets you see and compare versions of a file, including multiple backup versions, saved local changes, and the buffer of unsaved changes for the active file. If the current file is under version control, all types of revisions are available in the History Manager”.

Next stop is at a feature of modern application development tools, that old guys like me can truly appreciate, “Refactoring”. When you have written thousands lines of code in COBOL using just a plain text editor, or even used the first versions of IDE based tools like Delphi at late 90's, you can tell the difference about massive code modifications at the years before Refactoring. As help says “Refactoring is a technique you can use to restructure and modify your existing code in such a way that the intended behavior of your code stays the same. Refactoring allows you to streamline, simplify, and improve both performance and readability of your application code”. I will not get you any deeper to this but defenitely is something that every developer who builds applications with multiple units/forms should take into great consideration.

I will spend the rest of the night looking to demos, reading articles and watching videos at Embarcadero’s Developer Network. My purpose is to feel as much confortable with my new toy so I can start migrating old code libraries and my Data CentricApplication Framework* before I start migrating applications.

*I am preparing some articles for the “Data Centric Application Framework” and hope to publish them soon.