Saw a preview of Borland Delphi 2005

I went to Borland Singapore yesterday to attend the launch of Borland Delphi 2005 and Borland JBuilder 2005.

Borland had just recently shifted their office from Suntec to Harbour Front. During the presentation of Delphi 2005, met Steven Siah, and Shaomin there, both employees of Borland Singapore.

When I reached there at 8.30am, John was there already and I went up and said hello to him. He looked exactly like what he looked like in the picture. Somehow, I expected him to be slightly different. (Insert Twilight Zone music here) There were 3 talks. One by Frank Teh, then John, and finally Jacky Lee.

The future of Delphi looks very bright indeed.

The Delphi 2005 IDE now supports at least 2 languages, Delphi and C#, and supports .NET and Win32 development.

The most exciting features of the Delphi 2005 IDE, as presented by John, seems to be the history view (which supports differencing and highlighting of those differences), sync edit, refactoring and unit testing.

At the end of the presentation, due to a question from a member of the audience, John mentioned that Borland has two IDE cores: the Galileo, and the Primetime IDE core. The question was about the future of the Borland C++ Builder and John's reply seemed to imply that BCB will be integrated into the next release of the Galileo IDE core. Meaning, Delphi 2006 (or whatever the next version is called) will support even more languages than before!

Borland has made the reviewer's guide available on Monday. Check out the Delphi 2005 Reviewer's Guide.

After the presentation, had to leave Borland Singapore immediately as I have a meeting at a school to discuss some contract work that I'm bidding for.