8 replies to this topic

[whitebread]

I decided to learn Delphi. It's a natively-compiled language, and should provide some entertainment.

My question is: what are some good tutorials for Delphi XE2? What about books?

[Max Norris]

whitebread, on 06 July 2012 - 17:12, said:

My question is: what are some good tutorials for Delphi XE2? What about books?

Been some time since I've worked with Delphi, but if I recall Marco Cantu wrote some pretty good books. Start with Essential Pascal and Essential Delphi, then go through the various handbooks in order (2007, 2009, 2010, XE and I think XE2 is in the works) as each version of the language added new features and tools. Delphi Basics (http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/) was a decent reference site too if I remember.

[paxa]

not my intention to troll, but delphi it's still alive, i didn't know that, i thought that they stopped releasing it...jeeezzz brings me back some memories

[Max Norris]

paxa, on 06 July 2012 - 19:47, said:

not my intention to troll, but delphi it's still alive, i didn't know that, i thought that they stopped releasing it...jeeezzz brings me back some memories

Yep, it's still kicking, and they're still cranking the new versions out. They've been improving on it... 64 bit support (finally... it's been long enough), OSX/iOS support, their own "WPF knockoff" of sorts, there's a dotNET version now (Prism). etc, plus they've improved on what it's always been good at (databases, services and things like that). I've since moved on but I know a few people who are still pretty active with it, hasn't moved out of the "still alive and dying" category in years heh.

[REM2000]

I love Delphi and still do little company applications in delphi, the executables are fast and reliable.

The only thing putting me off the start edition was no ADO connections and most of my delphi personal stuff is done to a SQL Server Express Database, i think the Starter you can't even connect to a MySQL database.

As for tutorials, the office embargo site has quite a few on there.

[virtorio]

The Delphi section on the Embarcadero forums is a great place to get your questions answered (and chances are, your question has been asked and answered in the past).

https://forums.embar...a?categoryID=12

paxa, on 06 July 2012 - 19:47, said:

not my intention to troll, but delphi it's still alive, i didn't know that, i thought that they stopped releasing it...jeeezzz brings me back some memories

They never stopped releasing it, but it's changed hands a bit. Borland split their developer products off as a new company called CodeGear which has since been brought by Embarcadero.

I miss using Delphi now we're developing in .NET.

[Asmodai]

Wow, brings back memories. Delphi was my IDE/Language of choice from High School through college and I did all my personal development in it for the early part of my career. I had versions 1-7 (though I only had 1 because it came with 2 for 16 bit development.) They lost me with 8 though when they went .Net only. That combined with my employer requirements caused me to grudgingly move to Visual Studio and C#. By the time 2005 came out with Win32 support again I required Unicode support which it didn't have so I was unable to switch back. Lost track of them for a while after that until around 2009 when I heard they FINALLY added unicode support but by then my needs included 64bit development which they apparently didn't add until this latest version (XE2). Now I've been using C# and Visual Studio for over 6 years it would be hard to go back. I much prefer the syntax of C# but I must admit there is still great appeal in being able to compile down to a native code executable that can be distributed without the need for the user to have a giant framework installed.

[nicconics]

Does .net being installed anymore even matter? 4.0 gets installed with windows updates now, so unless the person has not ever updated their machine, they have .net.

[Asmodai]

nicconics, on 11 July 2012 - 01:23, said:

Does .net being installed anymore even matter? 4.0 gets installed with windows updates now, so unless the person has not ever updated their machine, they have .net.

Yes it matters. For one everyone isn't up to date on things such as much of the Government and DoD are still running XP with IE7. (Navy is currently in the middle of a multi-month upgrade to Windows7 with IE8)
Second lets say I developed a little app back when .Net 2.0 was current. My client uses that app and it works great with no issues for years. Then when 4.0 comes out they decide to clean house and remove prior versions of .Net. Breaking changes have occurred between .Net 2.0 and 4.0 so now (if the app runs at all) errors begin happening or they have to keep the entire .Net 2.0 framework installed for the app to work. (or I have to update an app that was working perfectly fine).
In the case of Delphi since it uses a linker it compiles into the native code executable any components of it's framework (VCL) that is uses so the resulting .exe requires no external files. No framework is needed to be installed, no JIT engine, nothing. "It just works". Furthermore unlike the .Net framework the VCL is often source code sitting on your system so you can look to see exactly how it works under the hood. Many classes are just object oriented wrappers around the base Win32 C API's. You can even tweak them if you want all though directly modifying the VCL is NOT a good idea.
As I said though I haven't used Delphi since 7 so things may have changed (or my memory may be incorrect.)