Delphi-tage 2011, Cologne

Hullo from Cologne!  Yesterday I attended the Cologne stop in the Delphi World Tour.  There were over 250 attendees, and they sold out all their tickets:

Delphi-Tage about to begin

C++ Builder XE2

Welcome!  This is the first article on my new blog, and it examines XE2.  I’ll dig right in:

First impressions

XE2 uses the same installer as previous versions, and has a fairly simple setup process.  For some reason the help uses a separate installer and so installation isn’t ‘set it and forget it’ – you’ll come back thinking it’s done to find you need to click Next a couple of times and wait for another five minutes.

The first thing I noticed when installing is that the installation components include a cross-platform option!  This is a promising start.  More on cross-compilation below.

When installed, the IDE starts up much faster than 2010.  To be fair, I’ve installed C++Builder XE2 and am comparing it to RAD Studio 2010, so it is probably missing a lot of the packages that the full RAD Studio includes.  The IDE looks identical to 2010 (the last version I used.)  It still uses plain Windows styles.  I’ve been hoping for it to look a little jazzier sometime – Visual Studio is visually very slick, and people, even programmers, do form impressions based on looks.  Embarcadero (then Codegear) played with this briefly for 2006 and 2007, when the toolbars in the IDE were rounded Office-style.  Unfortunately they moved back to unthemed controls.  The new VCL styles provided in XE2 (more on these below) provide a good opportunity for easy slickification of the base IDE, and using them in the IDE would have been a good demonstration of the versatility and robustness of the style engine.