Delphi 10 (aka Borland Developer Suite 2006) is here! Hurrah!

We now have shiny new CDs representing Borland latest and greatest Delphi offering. There are five of them, which does beg the question: "Why didn't you just use a DVD?". Beggars can't be choosers as they say so I prompty installed it. Prompt I may have been, quick it isn't... The installer scans for a bunch of prerequites like .NET and requires those to be installed before BDS itself will install. Once this is all in order, BDS unfolds onto your system, pulling bits and pieces from the set of CDs as required.

What choice! BDS 2006 comes with a collection of personalities enabling the IDE to target different environments:

1. Delphi for Win32
2. Delphi for .NET
3. C#Builder for .NET (obviously :-)
4. C++ Builder

Pick and mix - you choose. Want Win32/.NET interoperability on the same code base? You guessed it, boxes 1 and 2 are the key. Want to play with Microsofts new language? Yup, #3 is the answer.

After installing BDS 2006 I set to installing our libraries of components. I didn't actually have specific versions of them for this new version of Delphi, but as I insist on having the source for all our components this was no biggie.

I then pointed BDS at our largest application involving some 900,000 lines of source. It all compiled with a sprinkling of new warnings that had escaped the attention of our previous production Delphi environment (Delphi 7). I think that's pretty good really - three major Delphi releases and our code still compiles - don't you?