I was going through some boxes of old books to send to the recycle dropoff when I happened upon some old Delphi books from the late 90's.  If my readers do not know I was a Delphi developer for the most part 100% from 1995 until 2002 and used the IDE and language until 2004.  I started developing in Delphi shortly after graduating college at the end of 1994.  I worked for a consulting company called ANATEC in Southfield Michigan.  ANATEC was a very large consulting company that mainly developed client-server applications in Powerbuilder.  I started for the first 6 months working with Powerbuilder and Sybase for a few projects.  I was on the bench when our VP of Technology asked if another developer on the bench and I would enjoy going to see a demonstration of a new development tool Borland was showing off.  I had used Borland Pascal in high school and at home on Apple II's so I knew the company and their tools.  What I saw at the demo really blew me away.  I saw a great environment that would allow me to build Win32 compiled applications with the ease of Visual Basic.  I could get down to the Win32 API and do things that most C++ were doing at the time while still developing UI's quickly with drag and drop visual components.  Here is a rundown of what I really miss and loved about developing in Delphi.

Delphi7PE_ide

  • The ease of connecting and working with data
    • This is a blessing and a curse.  I agree that many old Delphi developers used the visual data aware components as a crutch to build really brittle applications.  In the hands of a skilled Delphi developer these controls were like magic and the features they gave were a blessing.
  • VCL
    • In my opinion the VCL was the foundation for the .NET Framework.  It was a great control library and allow the Delphi developer to work with the Win32 system in OOP ways.  Anders Hejlsberg was the Chief Architect of Delphi and also was one of the creators of the VCL.  I believe he brought this subject matter and new ideas to Microsoft to help developer .NET Framework 1.0.  In the end the VCL was a great tool and gave me the power to move into C# and .NET quickly.
  • IDE
    • What can I saw about the IDE?  I loved it!  I enjoyed every day working in it.  It allowed the Delphi developer to see both the code and the visual interface at the same time.  I sometimes miss that today in Visual Studio.  Having the IDE broken into multiple windows was also nice and allowed interesting add-ins to be developed by third party developers.
  • User Components
    • The controls developed by Borland were no the best but there were so many and the creation of new controls/components was not difficult so that the developer could either inherit or create new controls quickly to give new wonderful capabilities to their applications.  There were also so many free and affordable components on the market that it was sometimes hard to choose or find the best one to use.
  • The Datawindow
    • May have been the most undervalued part of Delphi's application development experience.  It gave the Delphi developer a way to not only store and share code and functionality between windows but also allow for the developer to see the controls that were in the Datawindow.  This might not appeal to all developers of today but it really was helpful keep the software logically organized for team development.
  • Object Pascal Language/Delphi Programming Language/Modern Pascal
    • Object Pascal was often laughed at my C++ and C developers. In the end it gave the Delphi developer all the power we needed to get the job done without the overhead of C++.  I could do all the OOP I wanted (except multiple inheritance) and create object hierarchies that allowed my software to be flexible, stable and maintainable.  In Delphi the classes were broken down into an Interface and Implementation sections that organized the class well for reading the maintaining.  The language inherited from the influential imperative and procedural programming Pascal language.  Easy to learn and also powerful to produce great software. 
//**blank form unit
unit Unit1;
interface
uses
Windows, Messages, SysUtils, Classes, 
Graphics, Controls, Forms, Dialogs;
type
  TForm1 = class(TForm)
  private
    { Private declarations }
  public
    { Public declarations }
  end;
var
  Form1: TForm1;
implementation
{$R *.DFM}
end. //this ends the unit
  • Finally the Community around Delphi
    • This may be what I miss the most about developing in Delphi.  The list of people and online resources are too extensive to list out but there was first the Delphi forums on Compuserve that allowed us all to reach out and exchange ideas and get help before the WWW became the destination for the conversations.  I am not very good with remembering all the great people in the Delphi community but there were many like Mark Miller, Marco Cantu and Dr. Bob and the great sites like Torry's Delphi Pages, Delphi Super Page and the Delphi JEDI Site.

Today I love .NET and would not go to any other development platform for my work.  The community around .NET is on par and slightly better than with what we had 10 years ago in Delphi.  The Internet today allows for stronger online communities.  I may and did miss many other aspects, people and resources that were and continue to be valuable to the Delphi community.  I apologize for forgetting anyone and anything that people loved Delphi for.  Add them to the comments so all of us and remember and enjoy the great memories.