Delphi 2009: Shark from eyewitnesses

Recently, CodeGear will present us its new creation, codenamed Tiburon (translated from Spanish - shark). What is under this name? The most obvious answer is CodeGear Studio 2009!

It is no secret that by the middle of this decade, Borland’s favorite software development tools from Borland, such as Delphi and C ++ Builder, began to experience difficult times. This forced the company to take a number of organizational measures aimed at combating losses, and in fact to abandon further business in the field of creating development tools.


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The most remarkable innovation that David Intersimon (technical leader of the development team) and his colleagues pay attention to will be expanded Unicode support. At the same time, it is noted that since 2002, according to regular surveys, such an innovation has been the most expected and sought after among Delphi users. Unicode is a character encoding scheme that actually provides the ability to encode any alphabet into a single set of characters. Simply put, Unicode makes it possible to use any alphabet, regardless of which regional settings are basic.

The total “unodification” affected almost all components of the IDE. First of all, this is a change in the string concept of the language. A new UnicodeString string type has been added. For UnicodeString, the internal format is UTF16. The string type, which was previously described as AnsiString, became UnicodeString. The types Char and PChar, which previously corresponded to AnsiChar and PAnsiChar, respectively, became WideChar and PWideChar. As a result, all header files for working with WinAPI are changed to unicode. If earlier all functions corresponded to A functions of Windows, now they will correspond to W functions ... For example, if in Delphi 2007 MessageBox was defined as MessageBoxA, then in Delphi 2009 it will be MessageBoxW.

Older data types can also be used, but an explicit type specification is required (for example, AnsiString and AnsiChar to specify the old one-byte string and character).

In addition, a new class TEncoding was introduced, designed to convert text into different encodings. Accordingly, some base classes have undergone changes that have begun to use this class in the implementation of their methods. So the TSFrings class's LoadFromFile method now automatically detects the text encoding and translates it into UTF-16 (UnicodeString) using TEncoding. Sets of the Set of Char type should now be replaced with Set of AnsiChar in the code. Otherwise, the compiler will generate an error.

The VCL also underwent separate changes. On the assurances of people testing Tiburon, the panel of components is quite significantly expanded. Quite a lot will be added, even if not key, but rather handy components (Category panel, link label, buttoned edit, etc.), known from third-party developments. And also expand the capabilities of many classes. For example, PNG images will be supported. Many visual controls will be adapted to the Vista style. So for TEdit Error Box will appear (hint, with an error message), additional style sets for TButton and many other innovations. All this will work under Windows XP, although, of course, it will look a bit simpler.

Developer: CodeGear (Embarcadero)
Language: English only
Support: WinXp Sp3, Win2003, Vista, Win2008 (all - x86-64)
Price: about $ 2,300

There is a time video (30 Mb, run 2008-08-13-WhatsNewInDelphi2009.html) with a demonstration of the possibilities and innovations.

you can download it here

Source here