What's New in Delphi with Allen Bauer

Allen Bauer, Borland's Principle Architect, presented What's New in Delphi. I took a three panoramic shots of his session:

This is from my seat in the back row. Robert Love is sitting right next to me, but I cleverly cut him out so his head wouldn't takeover the entire photo.

I took this picture while standing up at the back of the room. In this one you can see the top of Robert's laptop screen, and a ghost image of half of the back of his head. I didn't cut him out so well this time.

Again stadning in the back, but this time with the zoom turned on. The guy in the blue shirt laying on the floor to the left is none other then Nick Hodges. Being on the advisory board must be hard work.

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And here are my session notes:

Mostly covering IDE features since that is what Allen Bauer spends most of his time working on.

A full house in a double wide meeting room (the biggest they have next to the main hall), and this session is going to be repeated.

Galileo is a multiple personality IDE. Diamondback has DelphiWin32, Delphi.NET and C# in this single IDE. Diamondback is still a little "out there" on the roadmap. It is not pending release.

Debugging

• Win32 & .NET debuggers working simultaneously.
• Debugging .NET code hosted in a Win32 process.
• AppDomain support in the Module view for managed apps (App Domains show up in the module panes and in the scope browser pane.)
  • Switch between C#, Delphi Win32, Delphi.NET during same development session.
• Sorting in the modules view
• Exception notification dialog enhancements
  • Break / Continue buttons
  • Ignore exception type checkbox
  • .net exceptions now show the exception message on dialog
• Breakpoint view
  • Supports in-place editing
  • Check box to quickly enable / disable breakpoint
  • Toolbar
• "Log call stack" breakpoint action
• Multiple debuggers
• Debugger registration
• Betted IIS connection
• Cassini webserver support (still)

Refactoring

• Rename
  • Renames all occurrences of a symbol, entire scope
  • Will rename occurrences in a Delphi and C# assembly at the same time, if one references the other
    • So if a C# assembly declares a symbol and a Delphi assembly uses the C# assembly then it will rename it all occurrences of a symbol that is shared between the two.
  • This is not a regular text search and replace
  • Does not effect comments
  • If an unrelated symbol has the same name it is not renamed
  • Looks at descendent classes
    • Will alert about possible conflicts
• Extract method
  • Create a method out of a selected block of code
• Extract Resource String (Delphi only)
• Sync Edit
  • Edit all occurrences of identifiers within a selected block of code.
  • Specifically for local scope editing, does not take scope or unselected code into consideration. Not a replacement for rename.
• Find unit or namespace
• Declare Field
• Declare Variable
• C# & Delphi (Win32 & .NET)

VCL Designer

• Choose between embedded or floating designer
• Also has docked and undocked views
• Improved drag and drop design support.

Lots of cross product pollination between JBuilder and Delphi

Greatly enhanced tool pallet by Corbin Dunn.

If you rename a unit identifier (in any of a number of places) it corrects the name everywhere.

History file lets you compare and backup from multiple history backups

Makes heavy use of community tools - AQTime, Virtual TreeView, etc.