Why no love for Delphi 2009?

Yottskry

Hi, I notice in the release announcement for RB 19.0 that it supports Delphi 7, Delphi 2007 and then Delphi XE2. Why no support for Delphi 2009? We're, unfortunately, stuck using 2009 with no chance to go backwards and no possibility of upgrading. It seems a shame that RB can be used on older versions of Delphi than ours.

nicocizik

Hi Stephen,

Delphi 7 was the last Delphi release with the older style IDE and still has a strong following.

Delphi 2007 was the last Delphi release without Unicode support.

These are the reasons we (reluctantly) maintain support for these older versions of Delphi. Currently ReportBuilder supports 12 versions of Delphi. It is an enormous undertaking to release a product of this size for this many versions of Delphi.

As new versions of Delphi are released, we will likely drop support for other older versions as well. Also, as we move ReportBuilder forward, some new RB features that utilize newer Delphi features will not be included for older versions of Delphi.

Yottskry

Thanks Nico, that's reasonable. I know what it's like trying to wean customers away from older software so that you can take advantage of new language features. We have the same issue trying to get our users away from older versions of SQL.

I'll have to try to convince the powers that be that we need to upgrade Delphi. Sadly, that request has fallen on deaf ears in the past.