Chris Pattinson

Now that RAD Studio 2007 has RTM’d, we’re doing the final preparations for Update 3 - the update all our Delphi 2007 and C++Builder 2007 customers will ‘inherit’ as part of the RAD Studio 2007 release.

Update 3 is similar to Update 1 in how it will uninstall and re-install the product. We also broke out the main product binaries and then the help system into their own installers, to make future updating a lot less painful.

For current Delphi 2007/C++Builder 2007 users - you’ll likely notice we removed the option to NOT save off the cache of files. Sorry - too many folks ignored the warning, and had problems updating with update 2, and we wanted to ensure any following updates could apply without too much trouble. We have been looking at ways to re-engineer how the cache works (it’s effectively the ‘install image’ that MSI relies on) by either recreating it from the install DVD (takes a long time though) or at least letting you specific where to store the files (so, for example, you could use a network resource).

The Help/Documentation system had a number of fixes and you’ll start noticing code samples coming back into the documentation. A good sign, we all wish we could go faster. Personally I’m pleased with the new Doc team’s progress. They built systems to write content faster and better, with more frequent builds, and the help can be installed seperately from main product.

The help install takes 15-20 minutes on my laptop. Visual Studio broke it out into it’s own install. The ‘core’ of the RAD Studio files takes about 30 minutes on my laptop. These times are via online install, which seems a pleasant and easy experience. The time makes sense as the help files are downloaded, decompressed then registered. After install there is about 325MB of data in my ‘Help’ directory.

We fixed about 900 issues in Delphi and C++ as part of RAD Studio 2007, and over 150 of those were QC reports. Not bad given the focus was Delphi.NET.

I posted a list of the QC related fixes at two places:

Delphi 2007 side:
http://dn.codegear.com/article/36953

C++Builder 2007 side:
http://dn.codegear.com/article/36954

Fixes are in all areas. In general we continued our campaign to nail any crash, memory leak or instability bugs. Some still remain, but we did find and fix several really nasty threading issues in the IDE, and as a result the field testers noted that the IDE seems the most stable ever. We do a regular field test survey, and the pre-release candidate build had the highest satisfaction ratings in all personalities for stability and performance. Now I’m keeping an eye out to see how the ‘real world’ finds the capstone release to the ‘Highlander’ project. The team really pulled it together. In August we had two weeks of fixing where 1100 issues (mostly on the Delphi.NET side) were fixed! The following weeks were a focus on clean-up and stability.

This release does feel ‘baked’ - there are of course bugs we still want to go after for an update. A product of several million lines of code and 17 000 files to deliver is a complex beast. However this beast is looking healthy. I hope you find the tool to be a good experience.

Chris

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 2:43 pm and is filed under RADStudio, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.