Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't believe the hype!!!!, May 9, 2005
I was excited at the prospect of getting this product. I own Delphi5, and the idea of an upgrade that I could use to support my existing code as well as upgrade to .net in future or even (horror of horrors leave Delphi and Switch to C#) seemed great, talk about covering all your bases. The new features sounded sensible too. Synch editing (where changing a single identifier in a selection changes all the others) seemed a great idea.
Having always stuck with Borland in the past I was expecting something professional and polished, sadly I think Borland have lost the plot.
D2005 tries to be a Jack of all Trades and ends up being a master of none.
The user interface is cluttered (it took me about ten minutes just to hide all the options for .net, interweb etc when i was trying to build a win23 application. I think it would have made far more sense to present the user with a wizard at startup that would have determined which components appear in the IDE.
Performance is awfull, I have a fast(ish) machine, AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 1 GB Ram, and the IDE would frequently freeze for three or four seconds at a time whilst I was navigating through my code. The minimum specs of a PII/450 are a joke as are the recommended specs of a PIII/850. Even after turning off code completion and virtually all the other editor options it was still barely usable (in fact if only the options that were available in Delphi 5 are switched on, peformance is still terible).
And reliability! I had to do a double take on this, I was sure I must have installed something incorrectly or done something else wrong. It is unbelievably bad. I got constant Access Violations (I think Borland knew full well how unreliable it was going to be because 'helpfull' dialogs pop up explaining that a AV has occurred and asking you if you still want to save your work! don't remember that in previous versions!) and after these AV's any other action would result in further AV's. I think a lot of the reliability is down to memory leaks in the IDE. It would work OK for the first few minutes and then gradualy get worse and worse the more time I spent using it. I was so shocked at the reliability that I went onto Borlands Quality Central Site and, sigh, it wasn't an instalation issue, lots of people were having the same problems. I uninstalled the application, then reinstalled clean and added the patches available from the QC site but it made little if any difference. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Delphi5, ah bliss, fast IDE, fast builds (its actually a lot faster to constantly rebuild to check your code for errors in Delphi5 then it is to use highlighting in Delphi 2005) no AV's!
Overall then: nice idea if they can get the bugs out and maybe sort out the screen clutter a bit, but nowhere near stable enough at present for real world development.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best database development system for xbase user , May 24, 2005
I am extremely impressed and satified by the capability, simplicity, power, magic and genius of the Borland Delphi products. I have used Visual dBASE, Visual Foxpro, Visual Basic, Access and Visual Objects, and none of these products have the simplicity and power of this amazing product from Borland.
Moreover, this product dramatically reduced my programming time. Maintenance of a Delphi program is also a snap. For example, I wrote a DOS business invoicing and inventory program using Clipper in 3 weeks time, but the same program rewritten using Delphi was accomplished in only 3 hours. This was made possible because of the power of the Delphi database components and user interface components. The finished product is neat and incredibly fast. In the Clipper old days, I spent most of my time writing codes, now I have much more time to share with my family and friends, and enjoying other things life has to offer, thanks to Delphi.
This is the programming environment I always dreamed of. The beauty and elegance of Delphi surpasses anything I have seen and tried.
Naturally, there is no free lunch for anything in life, there is a steep learning curve. Delphi is the Clipper for the 2000's and more!
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