I’ve had a series of unfortunate events occur over the last week, from items taken from my checked bag when returning from Mexico to being a victim of identity thief resulting in thousands of dollars in illegal credit card charges to a hard drive crash earlier today that caused me to be down all day. But my luck is turning around with the arrival of my copy of Delphi 2005, which FedEx dropped off earlier this evening.
I wasted no time installing Delphi on my laptop…after getting the machine up and running again of course. Given the buzz last month about the future of VB, I decided it would be fun to open an old Delphi project and see if it would compile.
I found the source code for a time tracking application I wrote back in 1998. I copied the source to a sandbox directory and opened the project in Delphi 2005. Delphi needed to do was upgrade the project file so it prompted me for the target platform, Win32 or .NET. I selected Win32 because after all that was the target platform for the app back in ‘98.
As I expected /and hoped/, the application compiled and ran without a problem. And the original source code remained unchanged. I should mention the application does not use any 3rd party controls or library. It’s a basic application written in Delphi using out-of-the-box VCLs only.
I decided I wanted to push the envelope so to speak and compile this application written in 1998 for the .NET platform. I copied the original source to a new directory and opened the project file. Once again Delphi prompted me to select the target platform. This time I selected .NET. I compiled the application and it ran. Yep, Delphi source code written in 1998 compiled and ran as a managed code application in 2005. And without having to change a single line of code!
Try that with the simplest of VB applications and you will not have the same results.
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