Yesterday I met an old friend in Shenzhen now on MSN. He told me that there will be an official news about DELPHI 9 on this year's BorCon, and sent me this: "Come to BorCon 2004 (US) to see the next Delphi release! - by John Kaster.
But unfortunately, there are 23 days left before BorCon 2004. I searched with GOOGLE and found no more content than this one on BDN. It seems that everything will not be known until after the opening of BorCon.
However, from this article alone, we can roughly see some signs. What I pay most attention to is the content in technical sessions:
First of all, ECO. This O/R Mapping, developed from BOLD, was once highly expected by everyone, but unfortunately the development has not been very smooth. It was originally released in the C# Builder Architect version, but because it has not yet reached the level of BOLD, the quality of C# Builder disappointed everyone once. Then it was released again with Delphi 8 Architect at the end of last year, but it still failed to meet everyone's expectations. If it does not make any breakthrough this time, it will probably be worrying when MS's ObjectSpace comes out (the legend will be released with .Net 2.0). However, judging from this situation, it has added support for asp.net, and I don’t know how much it has reached in other aspects. What I pay most attention to is its stability and its integration with Together.
The second is IDE. I don’t know what aspects have been added. I can only wait 23 days to lift its veil.
Next is one of my most concerned aspects: the compiler. This session was taught by Danny Thorpe, but the only thing known now is that it will generate .NET and WIN32 code, and it is very encouraging to continue supporting native development alone, which means Delphi 7 will not be the last A native development version of Delphi.
Introduction to Refactoring! ! An exciting feature, I don’t know how much Borland has achieved, but it still shows that the expectations are too high, and it should still reach the level of Eclipse.
Effective Delphi for .NET and C# Unit Testing with NUnit: This is the same as that, and it is also an important feature, but NUnit has been developing for a while, so using ready-made things should be more promising.
Next is BDP. This database access technology under .NET developed based on dbExPRess still has its own advantages over ADO.NET. However, under .NET, ADO.NET is the mainstream, and the biggest advantage of BDP is its support. There are more databases than ADO.NET (if third parties don't count).
I'm useless, so I won't talk about CaliberRM.
The last two advanced features are the Open Tools API and CodeDOM under .NET. I have never used OTA, but the most criticized OTA is that it changes too much. Each version is very different. I hope it will be better now under .NET.
CodeDOM is quite exciting. I don’t know how DELPHI 9 is doing, because I have recently done WEB development in XML, and this function is very necessary for me. DELPHI 6 had the function of XML Data Binding three years ago, but it has not launched an XML (Schema) to DELPHI's Two-way Tool. So every time I modify XSD, I have to run the Wizard again, which is very troublesome. Moreover, there is no XSD RAD in DELPHI, so you can only write code manually or use external tools such as XML SPY. So I really hope that DELPHI 9 can add XSD's RAD and DELPHI's Two-way Tool, even the One-way Tool is good. :P
It’s impossible for us to attend BorCon. Let’s see what kind of Delphi 9 Borland will come up with when the event is held.