A developer's hands-on review of Delphi 2010

Embarcadero Technologies recently released Delphi 2010.

Embarcadero provided me with a review copy of Delphi 2010 and, after a bit of experimentation on my own, I spent some time with Embarcadero's Mike Rozlog, who took me on a whirlwind tour of the feature set. Overall, I like what I saw.

Feature set
I loved Delphi version 1 when I first used it nearly 15 years ago — perhaps it was because Pascal was the first language I used that I really liked. Sitting down with Delphi 2010, the old memory banks fired up, and after about 15 minutes, I remembered enough Pascal to hobble along. What really struck me about the Delphi system is that as an IDE it is extraordinarily productive. Its feature set felt very much like Visual Studio 2008 with ReSharper added on top, which is a great experience.

IDE Insight
Even better, the good folks at Embarcadero came up with a brilliant idea called IDE Insight. It is like IntelliSense (or the Windows Start Menu search system) and is applied to the entire IDE. Just press [F6] and start typing what you want to do, and a list of choices comes up and gets narrower as you type. For example, if you're editing a form, press [F6] and start typing TButton, and you will see the TButton class appear in the list. If you hit [Enter], then bang! a new button gets dropped onto your form. Want to add a new form to your project? Press [F6] again and type TForm as the text (see Figure A). In a code editor, you can do all sorts of cool things with IDE Insight. For example, [F6] + for will drop a for loop right in (see Figure B). I know this sounds like such a minor item, but it really does speed things up. Developers who prefer to not take their hands off the keyboard will really appreciate the keyboard-driven productivity of IDE Insight.

Figure A

Using IDE Insight to create a form (Screenshot by TechRepublic)

Figure B

Using IDE Insight to start a for loop (Screenshot by TechRepublic)

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