Chris Pattinson

Now that we’ve announced our Q1 Delphi 2007 release, I’d like to share a story of a couple users we had come in with their real world application.

 

A little bit of background- as we close in on a new release, we often bring in folks we call ‘Beta Bangers’. These are developers with a long history of using our products, with fairly large projects, and help us to do customer acceptance testing. Typically it involves them driving the latest build of the product, with their own source code, and a number of engineers and managers in the room. That’s how it went this time.

 

The project through brought in was just shy of 400 000 lines of code. It was a GUI application to manage manufacturing equipment, and they had a simulator to help test their application. The test system, a laptop, had Windows XP with 1.5GB of memory, and only a few GB of free hard drive space. It also had BDS 2006 installed on it.

 

We had to uninstall a previous beta build and clean up the registry of entries in HK_CurrentUser to begin testing. For Delphi 2007, we are working to do some package renaming to ensure it resides well with BDS 2006.

 

The install went smoothly, and they chatted a bit about their business. It took about 20 minutes to install.

 

Then we opened up their major project, it was based off of code from Delphi 5 and upgraded to BDS2006. We did not have the latest build of Rave reports available, so spent some time debugging and removing the reporting module – a good start to testing, since error insight was working perfectly. They were quite impressed, since this was one of the items on their ‘issues list’.

 

To back up a second - we ask our beta bangers to bring a list of issues with them, so we can reproduce on the new build. They had a list of error messages, odd behavior and performance that we went through.

 

Overall feedback was really good – error insight which used to give many false positives on a major part of their source displayed correctly with no false errors, compile and build numerous times was snappy (they commented it ‘felt’ snappy, and R&D indicated as a result of optimizations it should be 25% to 30% faster), and other comments were made that we’d identified and fixed race conditions involved in code insight.

 

We imported a custom control package from BDS 2006 without issues, and then reopened it back in BDS2006. We tested the theme features and explained how the IDE is themed, and built applications may or may not be themed. It’s something the team is still looking into – basically the form designer right now displays the application as if were themed.

 

Old applications will not have runtime themes turned on (this would be intrusive), but with the IDE themed, this means run time can look different then design time. There has been a simple option added to the projection options, in the application settings, that will enabled runtime themes to be turned on or off.

 

We tested performance, which the beta bangers were really impressed at with startup speed, code insight improvements (they indicated used to take 3-5 seconds for things that now take l second) and memory management which is much more solid then BDS2006.

 

We took almost an hour to test out the debugger and debugging. No crashes, fast evaluations, and demonstrated the improvements to the debugger for call stack enhancements in the structure pane view. No evident memory leaks so we made good progress there.

  

A couple enhancements are enabling breakpoint in the call stack view, and putting a colored ball to indicate that debug information is available for that module.  And as usually you can double click on the call stack items to go to the relevant code.

 

We took note of a couple feature requests, including the ability to change a file to read/write if the IDE encountered it as read only – instead of having to leave the IDE.

 

Later we worked with the project groups and added/removed projects. We identified a potentially serious crash bug with the adding and removing of projects, then rebuilding. Exactly what we hoped to catch as a result of these sessions!

 

Overall, I considered this a highly productive meeting with some of our real customers. We got to show off some real improvements in Delphi 2007, and identify some areas to add some polish. We also identified a ‘good’ crash bug which we have reproducible steps for, and should nail it before release. And, we actually had fun while doing the work, and learned more about one of our long term customers.

 

 

 

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