Reading through the new feature list it is being said that the new syntax for the Delphi 2009 language constructs is being supported, i.e. Anonymous Methods and Generics. Furthermore, a lot of productivity features habe been added to make creation of diagrams and navigating from those to your source code much easier.

Have a look at http://www.modelmakertools.com/modelmaker/history/mm1000.html for a complete list of features.

Our lab project will be a simple VCL Forms Application created using File / New … / VCL Forms Application.

On the dialog being shown as a result of this, we will drop a TButton and double-click it in order to implement the OnClick event.

The dialog should look like this:

In the OnClick event we will implement some very insightful piece of Delphi code:

The code checks the Sender reference if it has been instantiated from TButton and shows a message if true. Wonderful.

Now to debugging.

Breakpoints are great to start investigating variable values at a certain line in code. Delphi makes it easy to set breakpoints by pressing F5 (default layout) or clicking in the gutter on the left side of the code. Let’s add a breakpoint in line 28 (referring to the line numbering above):

When running the application and clicking the button, the debugger stops at the location we wanted it to, however, we are unable to gain any useful information without additional work.

First of all, the value of Sender is displayed as "()"  and the value of "Self" is denoted as inaccessible. This means that the compiler has optimized our code and this is something one can switch off in the project settings. Thus, cancel debugging by pressing Ctrl+F2 and select the menu items Project / Options…

In the "Delphi Compiler" section, select the item named "Compiler" and have a look at the "Code generation" group.

You will find the item named "Optimization". Set this to "false" and it will be much easier to debug your applications. Performance will be worse, but while developing applications it might be more helpful to be able to debug easily.

Furthermore, a lot of Delphi developers always complain that they get redirected to the CPU view showing Assembler code when they try to step into VCL code. CodeGear deploys the Delphi VCL and a lot of other things with source code, so one should be able to step into it, don’t you think?

A simple switch will make this possible: In the "Debugging" group on the same options page mentioned above, set "Use debug .dcus" to true and rebuild. Let me emphasize: reBUILD. A simple compile will not do the trick if you have already compiled your application and change the setting afterwards.

Let us rebuild the application, run it with debugging and click the button. We will find out that now we get a lot of information about "self". Great!

However, Sender is still displayed as (). If we evaluate the value using Run / Evaluate or simply press Ctrl+F7, we get the same thing. If we type TButton( Sender ) however, we get the information we desire.

So, it is good to remember that Sender is being passed as TObject and the debugger tries not to get into any trouble. It accesses the variable reference with this exact type and thus there is no information to display. You as the developer have to do the thinking and type-cast it manually to TButton.

One final note. The result displayed by the evaluation dialog is not very nice to read:

Click on the Inspect button in order to get an Object Inspector-like view:

Be aware that you only get this view to inspect Sender if you use the expression TButton(Sender) to type-cast it.

Hopefully this blog entry gave some insight into the awesome debugging features of Delphi. Not that they were unique to this IDE, but I found out that many people do not know about these informative tools included in the product. So, one does not have to buy third party tools to get good debugging results.

We used Delphi 2009 and the crowd was rather pleased with the efficiency, speed and reliability of the new version. There were people still using Delphi 7 and Delphi 2006 and they liked a lot of new features available in the new version.

Today, BASTA - THE .NET conference starts and thus we had the chance to meet up with the speakers in the evening as they already arrived in Mainz. It was a great evening and it was good to catch up with them.

Personally, I used the opportunity to meet and talk to Oliver Sturm and Gary Short from DevExpress in person to talk about XPO and related technologies that deal with Object Relational Mapping.

The funniest fact of the evening was however, that Oliver and me found out that we have been living in the same city in Germany for quite some time… we never met though, even as it is a very small city.

Hopefully, I will be able to deliver some useful development related content soon. I have to reinstall my system as the mainboard of my new system was faulty from the start and it has been exchanged during my vacation. I also got handed a wonderful surprise that one of my additional SATA hard drives has been formatted in the process - I still wonder how to manage to format a hard disk while exchanging the mainboard and reinstalling Windows on the primary SAS disk.

Oh well, I am still on holiday for the next few more days and these things will not be able to spoil the experience.

Actually, I am writing this post sitting on the balcony of a hotel in Lagao, Portugal with a bottle of local red wine to my right hand side, my iPod left of me, charging as it has been playing constantly today, while I was enjoying the sun and local beach …

I would like to point out that I am back to “business” on Monday doing a workshop on Object-Oriented Programming Basics in Delphi. If people want, I will point out some new things that are available since Delphi 2009. This will be a workshop as part of the Delphi Code Camp which is done by the Entwickler Akademie in Germany. Daniel R. Wolf from Delphipraxis.net (http://www.delphipraxis.net) will be doing the very same workshop with me together. If you are in the Frankfurt-area in Germany on Monday and have not known about the workshop, be sure to hop to http://entwickler-akademie.de/ as there are workshops all next week. It can never hurt to ask if there are seats available.

During my stay here, I was also involved in planning the sessions for EKON 12 as I am a member of the advisory board. Many well-known bloggers from the Delphi community will be doing sessions about Delphi 2009 in particular. Furthermore, we have a couple of first-time speakers at EKON. Daniel R. Wolf will be one of them, talking about two very interesting topics. One is Regular Expressions for Delphi Programmers, the second is called “Pathfinding Algorithms in Delphi”.  Barry Kelly, the CodeGear compiler engineer, will also be there in person and talk about details in the Delphi compiler. You surely cannot miss out on that! We will also have Jason Southwell from the USA over to do a couple of sessions. Jason is a number one expert with regard to Web Applications especially with regard to IntraWeb or VCL for the Web as it is called these days…

We also have the “regular bunch” of experts. Here is some of their session content:

• Olaf Monien will talk about the VCL for the Web and Webservices in general
• Daniel Magin aka “Mr. Interbase” is giving detailed information about building Interbase Databases and Applications. Daniel will be presenting other content as well, of course, but his long-time experience with Interbase made me use the alias.
• Daniel Wischnewski
• Marco Cantù
• Bernd Ua will deal with OOP basics in Delphi and other sessions
• Joeren Pluimers
• Hadi Hariri, who will offer a workshop for advanced IntraWeb users
• Thomas Pfister will show up reporting options for Delphi developers

I also emailed with DavidI today and he told me he will be there as well to do the keynotes in person.

You are still only thinking about coming to EKON 12? I think it is one event this year that you cannot miss. I am definitely eager to meet up with all my friends in the Delphi community in person again. Please have a look at www.entwicklerkonferenz.de for the exact dates, complete session schedule and all other things you need to know about the conference.

So, this is enough for the time being. I will email some photos soon …

Oh, if you can read German, be sure to read the introductary article about Delphi 2009 from Daniel Magin, Thomas Pfister, Olaf Monien and me at entwickler.com . It contains some useful information if you consider upgrading to Delphi 2009.