Sip from the Firehose

{ 42 } Comments

1. Alister Christie | August 14, 2011 at 5:39 pm | Permalink

   I was really impressed with the list of features in this version of Delphi, XE was a bit disappointing, XE2 is jaw dropping. I was really impressed at the Auckland event, and I can’t wait to get my hands on XE2.

2. iwan | August 14, 2011 at 5:42 pm | Permalink

   Very nice to hear the feature matrix preview is out. A lot of new stuff to learn here, let say live binding, Firemonkey, datasnap connection manager (i like this at most). Great work …

3. Louis Kessler | August 14, 2011 at 6:34 pm | Permalink

   David:

   What will happen to our current Delphi programs that use the Ribbon? Will they be supported in XE2?

   If so, how will they translate to the Mac? I’m sure Mac users will NOT be happy using a Ribbon interface.

   And how about iOS? There’s no way the Ribbon would work there.

   Would I be forced to write three different interfaces for the 3 platforms? I might want to do that anyway, since Windows, Mac and handheld users expect their own standard UI. But would I have to?

4. David Intersimone | August 14, 2011 at 7:16 pm | Permalink

   Louis - Ribbon Controls are available only for Windows. When you are using FireMonkey to build HD and 3D UI applications you have one set of components that work on all platforms. If you want to call operating specific functions that are not available on other platforms, then you can ifdef those portions of code.

5. Guest | August 14, 2011 at 7:47 pm | Permalink

   any difference of these two ?

   VCL (Visual Component Library) for rapidly building 64-bit applications for Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
   VCL support for Win64

6. David M | August 14, 2011 at 8:28 pm | Permalink

   That’s quite a list!

7. Lachlan Gemmell | August 14, 2011 at 10:35 pm | Permalink

   Sorry to nitpick but you’ve made a grammatical error on a particularly important sentence of your post. It currently reads,

   "This year, in RAD Studio XE2, we will deliver new capabilities some of the following".

   It would be great to know what that sentence was supposed to be.

8. Wilfred Oluoch | August 14, 2011 at 11:54 pm | Permalink

   This is very very exiting.

   As a Delphi developer is see plenty of opportunities opening up.

   More videos, please! I cant get enough.

9. Jennifer Kuiper | August 15, 2011 at 1:11 am | Permalink

   That is *so* awesome. Can’t wait until deployment day. You guys are torturing us.

10. David I | August 15, 2011 at 5:53 am | Permalink

    Jennifer et al - When RAD Studio XE2 is ready to ship - you’ll get your hands on it. In the meantime, the world tour continues and we’re showing it everywhere. if you can’t make it to one of the stops, send me an email and I’ll try to schedule some online stops either when I am on the road or afterwards.

11. Arnaud Z | August 15, 2011 at 7:10 am | Permalink

    Please, give us a Db driver for Filemaker pro 11 databases. Thanks !

12. Monte Carver | August 15, 2011 at 1:48 pm | Permalink

    David I failed to also mention …VCL (Visual Component Library) for rapidly building 64-bit applications for Web Based applications, using Intraweb (IW).

13. Ron Grove | August 15, 2011 at 7:27 pm | Permalink

    Microsoft Office for the Mac uses a modified Ribbon so if a Ribbon implementation provided a view like that I doubt many people would think twice. Mac applications have become much more diverse in recent years.

14. Snorkel | August 16, 2011 at 7:25 am | Permalink

    Still no postgresql driver…

15. David I | August 16, 2011 at 8:02 am | Permalink

    Snorkel - DevArt has PostGreSQL and also a SQLite dbExpress drivers available. You can get them from http://www.devart.com/dbx/

16. Michael Thuma | August 16, 2011 at 9:26 am | Permalink

    This is what I call a list! Thanks god we have DVDs. Well done!

17. Bruce McGee | August 16, 2011 at 9:34 am | Permalink

    @Snorkel: Cases like these are why I’m happy to see sbExpress support ODBC.

18. Tomohiro Takahashi | August 16, 2011 at 6:25 pm | Permalink

    David-san
    —-
    VCL (Visual Component Library) for rapidly building 64-bit applications for Windows 7 and Windows Vista
    should be
    VCL (Visual Component Library) for rapidly building 64-bit applications for Windows 7 and Windows Vista and XP; Server 2003 and 2008.
    —-

19. Cobus Kruger | August 16, 2011 at 11:11 pm | Permalink

    OK, so I’m a little sad that there is no ribbon support, although it is probably possible to make one.

    What I don’t see mentioned that I am interested in, are:
    1. Is there a FireMonkey grid control, and how flexible is it?
    2. So FireMonkey will support styles, but is there a style editor in the box? Or is it a matter of assembling a list of images and referencing it from an XML file?

20. Paul | August 17, 2011 at 1:36 am | Permalink

    Thank you for the couple of "placebo" emails you’ve had to send me over the last few months. Given what you are going to shortly deliver it was understandable… And as an aside, I think everybody appreciates the way you’ve just laid out the deliverables in this next release - a big improvment over previous methods.

    I know you’re still not going to tell us a release date just yet, but can I tempt you in to telling us a date that you will make the announcement of a release date?

    I’m sure everyone is suspecting September 12th or thereabouts for the actual release, but any information that would help firm up that date would be helpful. For us, our customers on one particular continent are again demanding 64 bit. It honestly cannot arrive too soon…

21. David I | August 17, 2011 at 6:39 am | Permalink

    Corbus - you can set styles in the IDE and you can load and save collections of styles in a "StyleBook". We will ship with several styles and we fully expect that others will create and share/sell styles. There are 2D and 3D FireMonkey grids. How flexible is it? Not sure what you need. You can put anything in a grid (edit, list, button, bitmap, etc) - just like you can composite anything in any FM UI control. You can use effects and animations on any FM UI control - so you have full control over the color, etc in a grid. You can also set styles for a grid.

22. David I | August 17, 2011 at 6:41 am | Permalink

    Paul - I will add your comment to my list of the hundreds of ways that developers ask me/us when a version of one of our products will ship. We are still in field test but that won’t give you any hints. Some developers try to look at the field test number and see if we are getting closer. We’ve been talking and touring since August 2. But that won’t give any clues either. To all of these queries I always answer the same way - we will ship the product when the field testers, our QA and R&D groups say it is ready to ship.

23. David I | August 17, 2011 at 6:45 am | Permalink

    Corbus - a follow up to your grid question and UI controls in general - there are loads of UI controls for FireMonkey. And, we also have many of our tool and component partners working on FM support. There will be plenty of components for you to build great HD and 3D applications.

24. David Patte | August 17, 2011 at 8:48 pm | Permalink

    I went to the XE world tour and remember asking whether there were any plans to support iPad. I forget the name of the fellow doing the demo, but he said it sounded like a good idea, but it wasn’t planned for XE.

    Now I understand that it was actually planned for XE2.

    One thing I notice in the above list though is:
    - Deployment Manager: Deploy Delphi applications to OS X, 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows
    - Deployment Manager: Deploy C++ applications to OS X and 32-bit Windows

    So I may sound repetitive, but…

    Are there any plans to support Win64 from C++?

25. Cobus Kruger | August 17, 2011 at 11:59 pm | Permalink

    The news of a grid that can be composed with other FireMokey controls is fantastic! As with a lot of Delphi apps, our’s is business-centric and database-heavy and the DBGrid has simply not been usable for anything but very basic display.

    So now you have my attention!

26. David I | August 18, 2011 at 5:41 am | Permalink

    David - C++ Win64 will be supported next time along with the support for the (now) approved C++ 2011 ISO standard.

27. Hiroko Takahashi | August 18, 2011 at 5:44 am | Permalink

    ¿ C++Builder Windows 64 bits support in XE2 ?

28. David Intersimone | August 18, 2011 at 5:54 am | Permalink

    Hiroko - see my other reply - C++ for 64-bit windows is on our roadmap, is being worked on by our compiler team and will be available next time.

29. David Intersimone | August 18, 2011 at 5:56 am | Permalink

    Arnaud writes "Please, give us a Db driver for Filemaker pro 11 databases. Thanks !"

    You can use dbExpress support for ODBC drivers to get to FileMaker and lots of other data sources.

30. David Intersimone | August 18, 2011 at 6:00 am | Permalink

    Lachlan writes "Sorry to nitpick but you’ve made a grammatical error on a particularly important sentence of your post. It currently reads,’This year, in RAD Studio XE2, we will deliver new capabilities some of the following’. It would be great to know what that sentence was supposed to be."

    Lachlan - thanks for catching my typo - I have fixed that sentence in my blog post to hopefully clear things up.

    Everyone - Lachlan has a great site where he shows you a lot of the technical innovations in Delphi since 2005 - check it out at http://www.tindex.net/. You can also read about the TIndex at http://blog.tindex.net/

31. David Patte | August 18, 2011 at 6:28 pm | Permalink

    Thanks David I. I understand fully the decision.

32. masivelo | August 18, 2011 at 9:44 pm | Permalink

    Great works !! I think to grow up Delphi community more quickly, will a starter version be available for free or at least at a really lower price that new limited budget student/developer can afford ?!

33. Fritz Franz | August 18, 2011 at 10:58 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for this list, DavidI!! It’s just impressive to see what will be new in Delphi soon.
    Just a question: is it really FastReport *4* which will be bundled? As I know version 5 of FastReport is near to be released …

34. John | August 20, 2011 at 10:40 am | Permalink

    Add smart ptr support to delphi.

    now i have to say delphi is still suck environment.

35. Pratt | August 21, 2011 at 10:00 am | Permalink

    How about IDE, is there finally an option to add new events at the end of file like D1-D7 ? I can’t imagine anyone wanting events in alphabetical order. This is THE reason I’m staying with D7

36. David I | August 21, 2011 at 10:27 am | Permalink

    Pratt writes: "How about IDE, is there finally an option to add new events at the end of file like D1-D7 ? I can’t imagine anyone wanting events in alphabetical order. This is THE reason I’m staying with D7"

    Not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about when you add a new event handler for a component?

37. David I | August 21, 2011 at 10:31 am | Permalink

    John writes: "Add smart ptr support to delphi. now i have to say delphi is still suck environment."

    Thanks for the suggestion. You can easily create your own smart pointers in just about any object language including Delphi and C++.

    Not sure what your list of suckage is. Can you be more specific?

38. John | August 21, 2011 at 12:47 pm | Permalink

    >>Thanks for the suggestion. You can easily create your own smart pointers in just about any object language including Delphi and C++.

    I know there are some implementations of smart pointer for delphi.

    but one big problem is that every implementation can’t handle object trasparently because .(member access operator) can’t be overriden.

    Then I have to write like
    var
    Stream: TSmartPtr;

    Stream.GetObject.Read(Buffer…
    or
    with TStream(Stream) do
    begin
    Read(Buffer….)
    end;
    instead of
    Stream.Read(Buffer…)

    >>Not sure what your list of suckage is
    my list of suckage is.

    No standard serialization mechanism.
    No standard nullable type and tuple class more.
    No standard Garbage collectors.
    Poor standard generics collections(no SortedDictinary, OrderdDictionary and so on).
    No reliable well-desingned network library(Indy is sometimes buggy ).
    No parallel library.

    Standardization is important.

39. Pratt | August 21, 2011 at 1:05 pm | Permalink

    Pratt writes: "How about IDE, is there finally an option to add new events at the end of file like D1-D7 ? I can’t imagine anyone wanting events in alphabetical order. This is THE reason I’m staying with D7"

    >>Not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about when you add a new event handler for a component?
    Yes, IDE arranges them in alphabetical order so they go all over the code. In D7 they go at the end of code and it’s easy to move them where I want.

    It would be so easy to add an option for those who want old behavior back.

40. David I | August 21, 2011 at 4:12 pm | Permalink

    Pratt writes: "It would be so easy to add an option for those who want old behavior back."

    Got it. Will ask the team to add an option if i cant find one.
    Thanks.

41. Michael Philippenko | August 22, 2011 at 10:09 pm | Permalink

    Hello David and hello all!

    I want to answer about FastReport:

    1. There will diferent edition of FastReport. FastReport VCL 4 RAD Edition in RAD Studio. Of course just after release of RAD Studio we will release FastReport VCL 4.12 (wich will be compatible with 64-bit version also)
    2. That is why release of FastReport 5 was delayed.

    Thank you!

42. Rômulo | October 14, 2011 at 6:36 am | Permalink

    David I, the ODBC driver is just for Windows application. Please give us a ODBC driver for Mac OS X application too.

    [DCC Fatal Error] Unit1.pas(8): F1026 File not found: ‘Data.DBXOdbc.dcu’ (unit scope "Data" indicates Win64, OSX32, Win32 only)

    [...]
    David Intersimone | August 18, 2011 at 5:56 am | Permalink
    Arnaud writes "Please, give us a Db driver for Filemaker pro 11 databases. Thanks !"

    You can use dbExpress support for ODBC drivers to get to FileMaker and lots of other data sources.
    [...]

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   [...] Heute, 02:20 David I hat eine Liste mit den neuen Features rausgegeben sehr beeindruckend… http://blogs.embarcadero.com/davidi/2011/08/14/41124 Delphi 64-bit compiler Delphi OS X compiler C++ OS X compiler FireMonkey Platform for creating [...]

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