Delphi XE2 is here!

[czar]

I have spent the day playing around with firemonkey and with livebindings and it is looking really nice. It appears that embarcadero have cobbled together code from vgscene and from glscene and made something very easy to use and so far it appears pretty robust. It will take a while to work out how everything works but Delphi XE2 really is a big change and a breath of fresh air. The animations you can make without any code are quite impressive. Also access to built translate features and shaders should come in handy.

I haven't had a chance to get the MacOSX working yet because I need to update my MacBook to Snow Leopard - DVD has been ordered. I tried using a virtual mac running inside virtualbox but so far that has been a failure - but I am hoping that is just because it is a virtual mac and not real hardware.

I am hoping that better heads than mine can create a game engine to work inside firemonkey so that same code can be compiled to work on pc, mac and ios from what I have seen there is no reason that this cannot be achieved. Obviously I am not talking about making the next blockbuster FPS within this framework.

[Traveler]

Unless I misunderstood, but the starter edition doesn't have the multiple OS support, right?

[czar]

Unless I misunderstood, but the starter edition doesn't have the multiple OS support, right?

The feature list I saw had starter edition for $199 and it did have ios and macosx listed

However, now I can't find it - it would be a mistake if they did not include it.

[Andru]

Andru - from what I understood you do have access to accelerometer and gps and all those hardware bit of the ipad/iphone

That is great, but what about implementing In App Purchase or additional functionality for publishers? Without Cocoa headers(and some Carbon) it will be absolutely unusable. But seems it uses FreePascal for iOS, so it will be possible to implement all these. But this means that there is no need to buy Delphi XE2... but maybe they provide some functionality for iOS-devices as it provided by XCode?

[Stoney]

The feature list I saw had starter edition for $199 and it did have ios and macosx listed

The official feature list from Emba doesn't include it: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/41563
It's a shame though, I was planning on buying the Starter edition if Win64, Mac OS X and iOS were included, but I can't afford Delphi XE2 Professional.

[czar]

bugger!

Short sighted people making those kinds of decisions. You would think embarcadero would want to grow their user base.

When I went to the embarcadero day 95% of delegates were over 40 - myself included - if I need to hire someone else for my team where do I get someone with experience? Bad move.

[deathshadow]

It's a shame though, I was planning on buying the Starter edition if Win64, Mac OS X and iOS were included, but I can't afford Delphi XE2 Professional.

I'm a little miffed they don't even include the command line compiler in Starter.

The "pro" price makes my eyes bug out -- what is this, 1979? Far cry from Borland's "If we price this at $60 it'll sell like hotcakes". It's become the opposite of what made many of use Borland compilers in the first place instead of say... Microsoft compilers...

[LP]

I think Delphi XE 2 Professional is worth the price considering that it supports 3 platforms. Just think of Flash CS5 that costs $700 and 3D Studio Max that costs $3500.

I think they rushed the release of Delphi XE 2, should have waited one more month, but again, product of this size will need few iterations in several years to become fully mature.

Delphi XE 2 now includes many features I've been waiting for years, but they still have missed one - inline/automatic documentation that is available in Visual Studio since 2007 (or earlier, I'm not sure), where you write comments and they are displayed every time you write the function along with the descriptions of the parameters and so on.

[deathshadow]

I think Delphi XE 2 Professional is worth the price considering that it supports 3 platforms. Just think of Flash CS5 that costs $700 and 3D Studio Max that costs $3500.

... and FPC/Lazarus which costs nothing... much less GCC, GAS...

I think what makes it seem so ludicrous is the price disparity between starter and pro --- 425% price increase off of a $200 base just to go cross platform and toss in the command line version of the compiler? BULL!

[LP]

I was thinking they would release Delphi on 8th of September or close to this date - this is when I'll be visiting their RAD Studio XE2 World Tour (hope to get a discount for the professional version ).

I've been using their RTM version since I'm in beta program so can only comment on that. It's an enormous step from the previous Delphi versions, it's 64-bit support is rather impressive. I'm also very happy that you can use 64-bit assembler.

There are other things in Delphi XE 2 which I think Embarcadero guys accomplished very well in Delphi XE 2, but I'll comment on this later (after getting my XE 2 version since now I'm still under NDA).

I haven't had a chance to get the MacOSX working yet because I need to update my MacBook to Snow Leopard - DVD has been ordered. I tried using a virtual mac running inside virtualbox but so far that has been a failure - but I am hoping that is just because it is a virtual mac and not real hardware.

FireMonkey by default seems to use hardware acceleration so I think this can be causing the problems.

I am hoping that better heads than mine can create a game engine to work inside firemonkey so that same code can be compiled to work on pc, mac and ios from what I have seen there is no reason that this cannot be achieved.

They abstracted FireMonkey's wrapper for hardware very well and you can take advantage of that. In my own case, I already managed to hook Asphyre into FireMonkey: in this case, FireMonkey does the initialization part, while Asphyre still uses DX9/OGL/EGL natively. This answers one of my earlier questions - yes, you can use Direct3D / OpenGL / OpenGL ES with FireMonkey without problems, if you do it nicely.