Rant: Don't want Unicode just give me a working IDE

[Farshad]

<rant>
Today I had to install RAD Studio on my Vista notebook. I'll be on a trip to
make some system installation in another city and I'm going to use my
notebook as a mobile developement station. Anyway, I installed RAD studio
(only Delphi for Win32) which was flawless. I tried testing one of my
project in newly installed Delphi and it started to give strange errors. It
complained about missing DCU units. I checked the search path and it was
correct. I have copied exactly the same directory structure from my Desktop
XP PC to my Vista notebook. I checked all the PAS files and there were in
the place. I re-checked the search path for both Debug/Release
configurations and again Delphi refused to compile my project. If I go and
add so-called missing PAS files to the project then it works but how could I
add more than 100 files manually. Being a Delphi user for 13 years I was
baffled with no clue at hand. I restarted my notebook and this time things
started to be more strange. It compiled one of my projects but refused the
other one. It was like a nightmare. One of the compiled project produced no
output at all. It was a Library and though it was compiled successfully the
resulted BPL was no where in my Harddrive. All path settings were correct.
All required files were in place but Delphi refused to compile. Exactly the
same setup on my XP desktop works fine.

Has anyone else faced such a weird behavior from Delphi 2007 under Vista?

I didn't had time to go through the details of the problem.
It wasted one D2007 activation key and costed me 2 hours with lots of
frustrations. Time was running fast. I uninstalled D2007 and installed a
pirated copy of Delphi 7.0. (Sorry but didn't feel guilty at all) Delphi 7.0
was working fine. It compiled everything as it should. I started wondering
which one is Vista comptabile? D7 or D2007. Fortunately my projects can be
compiled in D7 too so I can go and do my installation.
</rant>

[Mr. G]

Surely the applications shouldn't be generating errors at all if they
are written properly. ;-)

Vista is a box full of surprises.

[Pieter Zijlstra]

Post by Mr. G
Surely the applications shouldn't be generating errors at all if they
are written properly. ;-)
Vista is a box full of surprises.

Vista is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

[Bob Swart]

Hi Farshad,

Post by Farshad
Today I had to install RAD Studio on my Vista notebook.

Have you installed it as administrator, or as yourself (not
administrator)? And are you running Delphi normally, or with the "Run as
Administrator" option? The latter may help, as the problems you describe
are most likely related to permission problems, not allowing you to read
or write to certain areas, and Vista making up for some directories by
trying to recreate them for you in your own sandbox (but without the
files you need).

Post by Farshad
All required files were in place but Delphi refused to compile. Exactly the
same setup on my XP desktop works fine.

I'm using XP and 2003 as development environments, and Vista and 2008 as
test and deployment environments. Quattro boot, although a VMWare client
is quicker (doesn't require a reboot of the entire machine)...

Post by Farshad
Has anyone else faced such a weird behavior from Delphi 2007 under Vista?

With other tools under Vista as well...

Post by Farshad
It wasted one D2007 activation key and costed me 2 hours with lots of
frustrations. Time was running fast. I uninstalled D2007 and installed a
pirated copy of Delphi 7.0. (Sorry but didn't feel guilty at all)

IMHO, you lost more than 2 hours of work by stating the above...

Groetjes,
Bob Swart

[f***@gmail.com]

Post by Bob Swart
Hi Farshad,

Post by Farshad
Today I had to install RAD Studio on my Vista notebook.

Have you installed it as administrator, or as yourself (not
administrator)? And are you running Delphi normally, or with the "Run as
Administrator" option? The latter may help, as the problems you describe
are most likely related to permission problems, not allowing you to read
or write to certain areas, and Vista making up for some directories by
trying to recreate them for you in your own sandbox (but without the
files you need).

Hi Bob,

Yes for sure. I never log to anything other than an admin account for
development purpose.

[Samuel Herzog]

I had similar fun yesterday with D2006 on winxp.

My mistake was, that I wanted to have the .dcp and .bpl files in another
directory than the default directory suggested by D2006.

It took me about one hour to get all up running again.
Finally it had something to do with my path environment settings.

[Kryvich]

Post by Farshad
<rant>
...

It's why the development under a virtual machine gets more popular
today...

[John]

+1

for unicode I use TMS and TSilang, and it works like a charm.
I have use D1 to D7 and D2007.
And unfortunately D2007 is the worst delphi they have done, D7 is the best.

D2007 is too slow , too unstable, and after a few hours of working it
suck more than one Gb of RAM... Using a .Net IDE was not the best idea
they had.

please come back to Win32 IDE...

[Charles B]

Post by John
+1
And unfortunately D2007 is the worst delphi they have done, D7 is the best.

You didn't try D2005 then?

CB

[John]

no nor D2006..D2007 is supposed to be more stable than D2005 so I don't
imagine ... :-))

[Kevin Frevert]

Post by Charles B

Post by John
+1
And unfortunately D2007 is the worst delphi they have done, D7 is the best.

You didn't try D2005 then?

Or D4 (worst version ever)

krf

[Uffe Kousgaard]

D2007 is too slow , too unstable, and after a few hours of working it suck
more than one Gb of RAM... Using a .Net IDE was not the best idea they
had.
please come back to Win32 IDE...

The IDE is win32 with a few .NET elements. Some have even managed to remove
.NET completely from a computer and still run D2007.

[Bruce McGee]

Post by John
D2007 is too slow , too unstable, and after a few hours of working it
suck more than one Gb of RAM... Using a .Net IDE was not the best
idea they had.

Just to add a different data point.

I use Delphi 2007 all day every day, sometimes leaving the IDE open for
days at a time (on VMs with 1GB RAM), and I haven't seen anything like
the problems you describe.

It isn't flawless, but in my opinion, Delphi 2007 is the best Delphi
IDE to date, and I have great expectations for Delphi 2009.

[Tom Corey]

Post by Bruce McGee
I use Delphi 2007 all day every day, sometimes leaving the IDE open
for days at a time (on VMs with 1GB RAM), and I haven't seen anything
like the problems you describe.

We've only moved a few of our projects from D5 to D2007, and so I only
run D2007 a few hours at a time. But it has been pretty much problem
free for me as well.

[Francisco Ruiz]

D2007 is too slow , too unstable, and after a few hours of working it suck
more than one Gb of RAM... Using a .Net IDE was not the best idea they
had.
please come back to Win32 IDE...

I preffer a Win32 IDE too , but I have the D2007 IDE working for days and
days and two or three times in a month I reboot the computer usually without
problems. And the only slow element of the IDE is the "unhelp" system and
the startup time (with a lot of thirty party components).

Regards,

Francis

[Nick Hodges (Embarcadero)]

Post by Francisco Ruiz
I preffer a Win32 IDE too

Delphi 2007 is a Win32 application. It merely uses the .Net framework
for certain functionality, much like it uses GDI32.DLL and other
Windows DLLs.

[Tom Corey]

Post by John
And unfortunately D2007 is the worst delphi they have done

/snort

[Chris]

Farshad,

Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista? I wonder if D2007 really
knows how to handle the internationalized folder names. A friend of mine
also had problems to install his French Delphi, on his French Vista. On his
system, for eample, the BDSCOMMONDIR path name was still containing ''All
users'' although there was of course no such directory on his system, only
''Utilisateurs''. Very strange.

Chris

[Bernhard Geyer]

Post by Bob Swart
Farshad,
Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista? I wonder if D2007 really
knows how to handle the internationalized folder names. A friend of mine
also had problems to install his French Delphi, on his French Vista. On his
system, for eample, the BDSCOMMONDIR path name was still containing ''All
users'' although there was of course no such directory on his system, only
''Utilisateurs''. Very strange.
Chris

Installed D2006/2007/RAD 2007 on german Vista without any problem. No
problems with interlationalized folder(display) - folders are the same
for all languages.

Does your firend have update a older Windows-Version with Vista or does
he have a clean installation. So i thinks its more a update-bug of Vista.

[Arthur Hoornweg]

Post by Chris
Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista? I wonder if D2007 really
knows how to handle the internationalized folder names. A friend of mine
also had problems to install his French Delphi, on his French Vista. On his
system, for eample, the BDSCOMMONDIR path name was still containing ''All
users'' although there was of course no such directory on his system, only
''Utilisateurs''. Very strange.

"Utilisateurs" is only the localized name that the explorer shows you,
"\users\public" is the path as it exists on the drive.

If you add additional language packs, you will see localized paths like
"Benutzer", "Gebruikers" etc.

[Craig Stuntz [TeamB]]

Post by Chris
Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista?

I notice that he's posting from Turkey. The default collation on a
Turkish machine tends to break a software left and right, because it
uses different rules for capitalizing the letter 'i' than every other
language on earth which includes that letter. I recently helped the
IntraWeb folks fix a similar issue. In this case, the IntraWeb code
contained a resource name in lowercase. When you pass that to the OS,
Windows will uppercase the resource name using the default collation.
If this includes the letter 'i', the code will probably break on a
Turkish machine. The correct solution here is to always specify
resource names in uppercase. This is a pretty insidious bug, because it
won't show up in any locale other than Turkey.

So, if you have a computer set to the Turkish locale, and you find
weird bugs like this in a piece of software, a useful test is to change
the locale to en-us. If that fixes the problem, you have a good defect
case that you can report in QC.

[f***@gmail.com]

Post by Chris
Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista?

        I notice that he's posting from Turkey.  The default collation on a
Turkish machine tends to break a software left and right, because it
uses different rules for capitalizing the letter 'i' than every other
language on earth which includes that letter.

<snip>

Hi Craig,

Yes you're right he (me) was posting from Turkey.
I never ever use a Turkish Windows for the Development purpose. The
Turkish Character collation problem doesn't apply to directory
structures unless you explicitly use Turkish characters which I never
use. I've used English Windows set to TR locale for years and I'm
aware of characters that I shouldn't use for directory structures. But
let me say that Windows handle TR locale very well. Just to give an
example D2007 was unable to find files under "E:\Project\QTools3\ADO"
which indeed contains no non-english characters.

As I stated in my original post Delphi 7.0 was able to load and
compile same projects in same Vista machine. And ofcourse I've been
using same Windows locale and directory structures for years with no
problem.

Certainly it was not a TR locale related problem.

[f***@gmail.com]

Post by Bob Swart
Farshad,
Do you use a ''non english'' version of Vista? I wonder if D2007 really
knows how to handle the internationalized folder names. A friend of mine
also had problems to install his French Delphi, on his French Vista. On his
system, for eample, the BDSCOMMONDIR path name was still containing ''All
users'' although there was of course no such directory on his system, only
''Utilisateurs''. Very strange.
Chris

Hi Chris,

I use english Vista with locale set to Turkish. Turkish is not my
native language and I never use Turkish folder names. The only reason
that I host a TR locale is to see if my software works correctly
under that Locale. That was the same since Windows 3.1 until Windows
Vista. I used all versions of Delphi from 1.0 to 2007 and it was D2007
for the first time thatvDelphi was unable to compile files already
existing in its compile path.

D2007 has some serious path-finding related bugs. A typical error
which everyone is familiar is when you press Ctrl-Enter and it is
unable to load Units which are already there in its search.path.