Delphi 2009 ISO Available (Direct Link)

[cronodragon]

Why did nobody mention it?!?! :shock:

http://www.delphi.org/2008/09/delphi...iso-available/

downloading...

[arthurprs]

downloading...

[savage]

These are trial versions I gather?

[Brainer]

Yip, they are.
BTW, is the full version out yet?

[JSoftware]

I've used it for a few days. It's pretty stable snappy, and I like the generics. Haven't made anonymous procedures work yet

[arthurprs]

I've used it for a few days. It's pretty stable snappy, and I like the generics. Haven't made anonymous procedures work yet

any troubles with unicode?

[JSoftware]

I've used it for a few days. It's pretty stable snappy, and I like the generics. Haven't made anonymous procedures work yet

any troubles with unicode?

I don't know. My local charset is fine with ascii
From the looks of it alot of new string and char types has been introduced to make charset handling easier and more transparent.

It also looks like the default "charset" is unicode now. Atleast I get alot of notes saying I should handle WideChar properly in some old string handling code

[masonwheeler]

The Unicode is a big problem with old code, because they changed the default string and char types to Unicode versions, which means any old code that assumes that sizeof(char) = 1 is now broken. This is not a setting that can be changed; there's no "compatibility mode" because the changes run too deep; the entire VCL and RTL are redone in Unicode.

Backwards compatibility is completely broken and everything with char-size handling in it has to be redone now. You essentially have to port all your code to its own language. (And doing that will either break your code on older versions of Delphi or require IFDEFs all over the place.) That means, among other things, that I can't upgrade my work to D2009 and enjoy the generics until RemObjects creates a Unicode-safe version of PascalScript. :evil:

I understand intellectually that they had to do it this way... but I don't like it.

On the other hand, CodeInsight runs a lot faster than it did in previous versions, which was always the source of a great deal of aggravation to me. (By the time the stupid thing's done blocking input and spinning my hard drive trying to build its memory tables or whatever it is it's doing for a good thirty seconds, I could have finished the line without its help and written the next two!) I haven't tested it exhaustively, but from what I've seen, that seems to be a thing of the past. And it also starts up (marginally) faster than D2007. So there's some progress being made. Now if only the Unicode thing wasn't such a beast...

[arthurprs]

why they don't created compiler option for the new strings?...

[DarkBow]

The Unicode is a big problem with old code, because they changed the default string and char types to Unicode versions, which means any old code that assumes that sizeof(char) = 1 is now broken. This is not a setting that can be changed; there's no "compatibility mode" because the changes run too deep; the entire VCL and RTL are redone in Unicode.

Yep, any String is now an Unicode string, and as you write sizeof(char) = 1 is false now. Strings in Delphi 2009 are UTF-16 based, since that is the native Windows Unicode encoding.

The old WideString remains as a COM type.

Anyway...

Backwards compatibility is completely broken and everything with char-size handling in it has to be redone now.

as far as I know (can't test because I don't have D2009) that's not entirely true. While you may need to change your code, some have suggested to try and simply change any String that you need to behave as before to AnsiString type.

Some information and references

http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Tibur%C3%B3n

These are 3 articles by Nick Hodges, CodeGear's Delphi Product Manager on "unicodifying" your code. I haven't read them yet, but they seem to cover a fair bit of cases.

http://dn.codegear.com/article/38437 - Part I
http://dn.codegear.com/article/38498 - Part II
http://dn.codegear.com/article/38693 - Part III

Hope this helps.