Here Comes Tiburon
I haven’t blogged in a while — yikes! I see now that it’s been over a month. It is definitely time for a post!
One of the reasons that I’ve been away is that things are starting to pick up with our next release, code-named Tiburon.
Probably the biggest feature — and the one that you’ve likely heard the most about — is Unicode. Tiburon will be a completely Unicodified (yes, I’ll take credit for making up that word 
) product. That means every single part of it will be based on and use UnicodeString as the default string. That means everywhere: compiler, RTL, VCL, IDE, COM, dbExpress, everything.
But Unicode isn’t the only feature in the box — far from it. In the coming weeks, you’ll be seeing lots information about all the cool stuff coming in Tiburon. Stuff like new VCL components, a really cool new DataSnap framework (that still works with your existing DataSnap applications), a new COM and ActiveX architecture, new language features like Generics and Anonymous Methods, IDE enhancements, and much more. You can get the first taste on David I’s blog. There will be videos and articles online, as well as events around the world demonstrating the product.
So keep your eyes open, and take a look at what we’ve been up to for the past year or so. If you have questions, please feel free to comment here. I’ll answer emails if you like, but a conversation here on the blog would be visible to everyone.
Thanks for the update Nick! I’d been starting to wonder about the lack of news. Can’t wait to see the other new stuff (and bug fixes), keep it coming!
July 15th, 2008 at 9:55 amUnicodified gets 585 hits on Google.
I suppose this problem will go forever from a properly unicodified IDE:
http://qc.codegear.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=35035
http://qc.codegear.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=29791
This bug are very annoying while working with non-ASCII texts.
Waiting for the release (or may be open beta-testing stage? I think it would be very helpful).
July 15th, 2008 at 10:05 amI really hope you guys consider cross development some day. Can start without gui, just rtl support to linux and macos (like fpc and lazaus do). I think is a must rigth now.
Best regards.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:09 amI saw the headline pop up in my RSS reader and thought that Tiburon had been released.
Imagine my disappointment to find out otherwise.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:17 amAbandoning backward compatibility with this forced unicodization of everything is a huge mistake IMO.
July 15th, 2008 at 10:28 amPavel –
July 15th, 2008 at 10:32 amI’ve seen your posts in non-tech, and I have to say that you are ///way/// over reacting to the Unicode issue. Things will be /far, far/ smoother than you believe.
Nick
I, for one, am SUPER excited about the prospect of serious enhancements to the DataSnap framework. I’ve shamefully been failing lately on my duties as a beta tester, I wonder if I’m still on the program… I would love to spend some time on this feature.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:02 amI am very happy that at last DataSnap got some attentions! When it was introduced in D3 it was a big step forward, but it was too much neglected since then!
July 15th, 2008 at 11:23 amNick
July 15th, 2008 at 12:53 pmNice to see you blogging.
Man, I can’t wait to see how things have been developed for DataSnap (specially SOAP)
Please share more…
July 15th, 2008 at 1:01 pmGreat
Finally little more concretes news about Tiburon…
I am always disappointed about the limited informations provided on each new software versions evolutions…
Sure unicode and new language features are essentials ! but i’m waiting with impatience to see any changes made on graphics components (ribbon? improved menu components and forms? more layout? improved panel? (gradient etc…)) cause unfortunately it was mainly that end-users remarks
Like said K.A. -> "Please share more…"
July 15th, 2008 at 1:30 pmBut WHEN will Tiburion be released? All we know until now is it will be in the second half of 2008. I do not want you to give a precise date - but a rough estimate would be nice
July 15th, 2008 at 1:30 pmI’m also looking forward to improvements in DataSnap, particularly if it simplifies things. I should also do some more videos on DataSnap (I’ve only got one so far). Unfortunately my new computer has Vista and my old copy of Camtasia wont work on it - sigh.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:46 pmIt is good to see that UNICODE is coming but I second Thiery says. I would like to know more details about the new or enhanced VCL components. Also now that codegear is owned by Embarcadero will there be Release Dates announced and a greater share of information spread out to the community. Now Codegear should not be under the same rescrictions as under Borland.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:17 pmWelcome back Nick.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:14 pmHi,
Did you test it can save Unicode in nText in MSSQL2000/2005 via ClientDataSet without setting ResolveToDataSet=True ?
see qc.codegear.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=31640
Thanks,
Bear
July 15th, 2008 at 5:58 pmHi Nick,
Is there any improvement on the appearance on the VCL like DBGrid, Splitter etc ?
Is there any NEW VCLs that can help us make difficult things easy, and normal things faster?
Bear
July 15th, 2008 at 6:11 pmWhat about .Net roadmap?Will ECO V be supported in Tiburon ?
July 15th, 2008 at 6:19 pmWhere is the VCL skinning capability???
skin!
July 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pmskin!
skin!
skin!
skin!
skin!
…
Nice to hear about Tiburon features once more. I also expect version control (SVN) integration in IDE.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:26 pmGreat to hear about this. Can I get full features at Embarcadero site? When will it be ready for us?
July 15th, 2008 at 10:00 pmInteresting, my RSS feed started with this sentence:
"haven’t blogged in a while — can’t really say why"
yet it changed when I got to this page to "yikes!". Did someone get to you?
:o)
July 15th, 2008 at 11:54 pmYeah, that’s great, Nick! Thanks a lot…
1. First, one of the most important things now is (imho) to build the ‘bridge’ for us. Show us how to cross the riff from the nowadays environment (I mean here everything, not only IDE) to Tiburon. (I already posted a quiz for David I, if you feel strong go there to take his prize
). Usually geeks are good to say what’s new but they often forget to say for what is good and how to use it. Did you included enough examples in the kit? Also, how to avoid pitfalls and traps. What to ‘do’ and what to ‘do not’.
2. Related to the ‘bridge’ above, take care at the installation experience. And I don’t mean now the installer only (ie. the program which ‘puts’ the SKU on my HDD), but also the migration procedure of our code from one side to the another. I mean programs and packages (first) then other settings like live templates and (perhaps) screen settings etc. Btw, did you improved the package manager?
3. Ok, it’s great to see this open door. We are always happy when we see that you are (more) communicative, as you know Borland being (from many years) very famous for its lack of communication and you still bear these signs even if we see some small signs of improvement. You must be /way/ more open, and this is in everybody’s advantage of course, but mostly yours. Mind you, we can switch, there are plenty of dev tools today :-). This is an area of ‘continuous improvement’ - day by day to find new ways to leverage the huge amount of intelligence which lies in your user base. Small constant improvements are the best way to achieve this, imho. But now I have a question (not a trap, a question): Well, if in "the coming weeks" (we are only weeks away from the release?
) depending on the feedback you’ll receive (I’m thinking now especially at usability issues & documentation), you will change something, or (almost) everything is ’set in stone’ due to ‘huge downstream effects’ (etc.) ?
Thanks once again,
m. Th.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:37 am1. For me Unicode is much more important than any backward compatibilities.
2. If Tiburon will not include Firebird DBX drive I will not upgrade my home version. Period. (At work it’s Arch. SA…)
3. Delphi badly needs ORM/MDA for Win32. And in Enterprise and Pro (limited) SKU as well. And for .NET, just think about somebody started an ECO project in D2006Ent. Upgrade to Architect? Will ECO be available as a separate add on? And ECO is all about .NET where there is (?) no support for WinForms design. I’ve already wrote in some blog comment that the ideal tool would be a UML/OCL/ORM/OPF tool with project generation for .NET/Win32 and Delphi4php - just a dream…
July 16th, 2008 at 2:32 amWhy there is not open source project to develop a Firebird DBX driver? And why is everybody using FB expecting it from Codegear?
Let’s see what are the Embarcadero plans for Interbase…
July 16th, 2008 at 3:38 amCongrats on all the upcoming features! Just a couple requests:
1. Please make Tiburon as stable as Delphi 2007 + December Update. Prior versions were buggy enough to impact productivity–and productivity is my #1 reason for choosing CodeGear over competing solutions.
With all the "invasive" changes, I’m more than a bit concerned about all the bugs that will get introduced in Tiburon.
2. Please support 32-bit icons and PNG images "out-of-the-box" so we don’t have to write hacks. Let us just click to load these images and have them look normal on Windows XP. This is year 2008…
3. Please replace the buggy Indy 9/10 with something that provides non-beta releases available for download. Bundling 3rd-party components that are beta-quality makes Codegear quality look bad especially if release quality updates are never available. At a minimum, replace Indy’s HTTP/HTTPS components with something more reliable like the open source RTC SDK 2.84.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:14 amHi Nick,
I have just mc’d the UK Developer Group meeting and commented on the silence from you. So good to hear from you. Someone in the group mentioned you Blogged last night, so I was corrected.
JAC.
July 16th, 2008 at 8:36 amHi Nick,
I am waiting for to be solved .NET compatibility issues. Can we install Visual Studio .NET component sets to tiburon????
( DevExpress Asp.NET components problem )
very urgent!!!
Tugrul
July 16th, 2008 at 8:57 amI once found a Firebird DBX driver from a third-party. Can’t remember where though. So it is possible.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:40 amAnd the Help/Reference Docs are also improved?
July 18th, 2008 at 1:45 am[...] - String Theory Here Comes Tiburon Don’t Get Caught with Boxes Tiburon’s LoadFromFile and SaveToFile for Unicode [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 12:09 pm[...] I’ve been working on mostly non-debugger things, including being heavily involved in the "Unicodification" of the other parts of the IDE. That said, those of us on the debugger team were still able to [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 12:48 pmThings are beginning to get exciting… like days of old. I am really looking forward to Tiburon. Bring it on… my credit card is ready.
July 24th, 2008 at 6:01 amLike other people, I am really curious, that Delphi2009 means it will be released in 2009?
July 24th, 2008 at 9:56 amA Bit off topic but, not hearing much about Delphi 2009 help yet..
As a recent upgrader to Delphi 2007 for win32 I was a bit disappointed in the speed of the IDE but more importantly the complexity of navigating the help system, both of which have gone downhill (IMHO) and are affecting my productivity.
Guys, if its not too late please ditch the vista help format it is a disaster I would buy delphi 2009 just for a return to the old style! Even better put it on-line with moderated comments/examples (like the mysql.com documentation) and please, please update it and include screen shots, (it’s 2008 and we still have no pictures!) - I for one still cant work out what half the VCL components are for and would love to stop using google as my main source of Delphi help!
Unicode is great but Delphi 2009 should also really address some fundamental issues of IDE speed and a focused help system (I’m sorry but including .NET and C builder stuff is unproductive to me - I’m sure the CPP builder guys are just as sick of delphi examples in their help!)
Thats my 20c worth. Delphi for win32 rocks for complex windows and database development and I for one dont follow trends and will be using Delphi until the day I retire, but whether that is D7, Delphi 2009 or Delphi 2019 is really upto you guys!
Boz
July 25th, 2008 at 7:20 pm"Generics and Anonymous Methods" - can’t wait to use them.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:53 pmHopefully 0.5s compile time will be kept
Go back ten years where the speed and efficiency was and ditch the eyecandy rubbish
July 27th, 2008 at 8:18 pmI agree with the comment on help. In D7 the help gave you examples and useful links. I could look up MessageDlg and copy the example. In D2006… useless. I too now use google and almost never F1. Our company was touch and go about reverting to D7 JUST because of the really really bad help.
As for unicode, I presume there is some way (compiler directive at top of unit?) that we can utilise the myriad of existing software/components that rely on string being as-was … in particular for handling comms such as serial ports etc. To tell all of us to replace such strings with say TByteDynArray is a HUGE ask - and the base index changes!
So for us developers who work outside of the normal "closed" system where it doesn’t matter if everything is unicode or not, is Tiburon an option? or is this where we stop? Or company has 12 years of software that will all break if string changes to unicode without option. Can anyone comment? Thanks.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:55 amGood to here from you Nick.
What about support for 64-bit OS’s?
Win XP x64 and Vista x64?
And how about us that install on a desktop and laptop?
August 8th, 2008 at 6:18 amAny help to keep projects in sync?
Dan –
64-bit support is the next major milestone after Tiburon.
What do you mean about installing on a "desktop and a laptop"? Do you mean can you install one license on both? If so, yes, you can do that. The license allows you to install Delphi on "a reasonable number of machines" as long as you are the only one using the product.
Nick
August 8th, 2008 at 6:56 am[...] Here Comes Tiburon http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges/2008/07/15/39066 [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 10:09 amFor me, this is a sad day. D2007 will be it for me, I have no need for UniCode. I need speed, and rely heavily on 1-byte character strings due to interfaces with legacy systems and hardware, try using unicode in serial port devices. I don’t know what we will do, but we can’t upgrade to D2009, our legacy systems do //not// support unicode. If there is no backwards compatibility, our code will break, and our interfaces will fail. For me and my 14 fellow developers the curtain is falling. I have fought to keep Delphi alive within our organization, but that effort now is futile.
August 12th, 2008 at 7:07 pm[...] In this post I’m going to present step-by-step instructions on creating a Delphi VCL Forms Win32 application that starts ER/Studio, displays its version number and closes it. Nothing fancy but just the starting point for more complicated scenarios. I will be using the current shipping version of ER/Studio 7.6.0 and the beta version of Delphi 2009 aka Tiburon. [...]
August 13th, 2008 at 2:40 amJames –
It need not be that way — I think you are drastically over-reacting to the situation. There are tons of reasons to move to D2009 besides Unicode, and the changes required for Unicode are not so drastic that you need to decide to drop Delphi without even having a look.
Please feel free to email me at nick.hodges@codegear.com if you have more specific questions.
Nick
August 13th, 2008 at 8:05 amHi there,
Just a small question about this Tiburon thing:
Will Delphi 2009 include support for static class / record constructors on the native win32 platform ?
With Delphi 2007 this feature is only supported for NET but this is not sufficient since there’s no clean way to initialize static fields inside a class / record to pre-defined values without static class constructors on the native win32 platform
Thanks in advance
August 14th, 2008 at 1:35 amWhat about right to left support in the editor and the IDE/VCL. Working with RTL strings in the editor was like a nightmare. Arabic,Hebrew,Persian and other RTL languages was very hard. many times I had to use a different editor to edit the strings then paste them into the IDE.
August 19th, 2008 at 12:53 amThe case is even worse for the VCL. many components do not have RTL support. Notably, TPageControl, Action bands. Most of the lately added controls (TButtonGroup etc) do not support RTL.
RTL languages may not be a priority on Codegear agenda, but there will be a lot missing if proper RTL support is not added to the entire product.
I spoke to a sales rep on the phone recently and he said that the planned release is early September (in Australia at least)…
There’s supposed to be a launch in Sydney soon and he said to expect an invite late Aug…am waiting with bated breath…
August 20th, 2008 at 12:14 amwhy break a system for unused features when there are so many critical items left undone. I have yet to hear of ANY feature which justifies paying #000’s. I have Borland Developer Studio, 2006, and we were promissed:
August 25th, 2008 at 11:29 pm* 64 bit and multicore performance,
* SIMD support, particularly graphics and scientific computing.
* a multithread that WORKS (I have lots of 2-line bugs available).
* GRAPHICS for GDI+.
* Windows Portability, ESPECIALLY WinCE/Mobile/.NET/Win32
All that work, and still no remote debugging in the Pro version, which is a deal-killer for me.
This is what I posted at David I’s blog - I wish someone would come up with the magic words that would get the folks at Bxoxrxlaxnxd Ixnxpxrxixsxe Cxoxdxexgxexaxr Embarcadero to quit being stupid about this. This is exactly the kind of issue that’s had developers leaving in droves, which makes me really sad - I started on TP 1.0 on CP/M, and really want to see someone pose a credible challenge to M$.
========================
I looked at the feature matrix for C++ Builder 2009 and all looks great except…
WHY on EARTH do you guys keep remote debugging out of the Professional version? I can do remote debugging with ANYTHING Microsoft - in ANY version. And, I even have TWO debuggers to choose from - the one in the IDE or WinDbg!
I had hopes you guys would pull your collective heads out of the sand when Embarcadero took over, but I guess that’s just too much to hope for.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:03 pmGreg –
I think we’ve said numerous times now that the Remote Debugger will be in the Pro version.
Nick
September 4th, 2008 at 10:36 pmNice to see you … thanks for the update!!!
January 13th, 2009 at 7:11 pm