Task accomplished, moved our system onto Delphi 2006

After I had crashed my office computer two weeks ago, I finally decided to install Delphi again. Now, usually comes the question which versions do I want and in which order would I want to install those.

Since we do not actively support our product version 3 anymore, which is out of development over three years now, I decided to not install Delphi 5 again. If a bug arises within the core our customers have lived with it for about 4 to 5 years now. So there will be a sensible way around. Further did we not receive any bug messages for over 2 and a half years on this version, so that I feel fine with this decision. Delphi 5 will not be installed on the development machine again. Good bye good ol' friend. *wave*

Now, I had to decide for our current product release, Content ACE v4, which is in release 3 by now. The baby is one and a half years old and I did do big changes at its core during the last three months. Not even bug fixes on my part :-) So, I decided, I do not want to install Borland Delphi 7 again, just for our main product ;-)

Dare me! I will try to move the whole setup to the Borland Developer Studio 2006 and finally get the advantage of those new memory manager, the FastCode Project functions, better string handling and so on. Especially the IDE is what prompted me to take that step.

Five hours later I just got finished with the first test runs of the system. We are talking here of about 100 MB Source Codes (including the ModelMaker models) compiled into 50 executables, libraries, resource files, etc. I had to get the three 3rd-party libraries up-to-date and installed, which was relativly painless. Worse was the setup of the whole environment as we had restructured our server infrastructure last week. All search paths needed to be adapted. :-|

Anyway, we have just moved the binaries to our primary web server and after 5 minutes of update-time it is up and running again. First performance results should be in within 48 hours, a more detailed set of data in about a week. Stay tuned to see what a simple re-compile of your old Delphi 7 applications will do to their performance with the Borland "DevCo" Developer Studio 2006.