Update 1 for RAD Studio XE2 is available

Today,  just less than a month of releasing the original XE2 product, Embarcadero published the first update of a series of frequent updates for RAD Studio XE2 (including Delphi XE2 and C++ Builder XE2). Update 1 contains 120 bug fixes in FireMonkey, VCL Styles, compiler, and IDE. This update is mandatory for installing the future updates. Here is the official announcement: Update 1 for Delphi XE2, C++Builder XE2 and RAD Studio XE2 . Make sure to read Release Notes for Update 1 before installing it, because Update 1 requires a full uninstall of original XE2 installation and is not a simple upgrade. You can also see a list of all bug fixes in this update here: Delphi XE2 and C++Builder XE2 Update 1 Bug Fix List .

As I checked the bugs list, at least one bug regarding BiDi support (QC # 97965) is fixed in VCL Styles. No other BiDi related bugs are fixed in this update. Embarcadero staff mentioned in Embarcadero newsgroups that the company is planning to release monthly updates for XE2 product, so we should wait to see if any of the BiDi related bugs will be fixed in the coming updates or not.

FireMonkey and support for bi-directional text – Part 2

Last month when RAD Studio XE2 was still in Beta phase, I wrote a weblog post about bi-directional (BiDi) text support in KSDev VGScene (ancestor of FireMonkey), questioning FireMonkey support for BiDi text, and why it is important to support it. As I mentioned in a post-script update, Andreano Lanusse commented on my post, and told us BiDi text would not be supported in the initial version of FireMonkey. Now it is been around a couple of weeks that the official RAD Studio XE2 is released, and its trial version is available for download. I decided to test BiDi support in the official FireMonkey using the trial version, and write the second part of my  investigation on BiDi text support in FireMonkey.

First of all I should mention that I didn’t expect any BiDi support in this version, so my initial intention was to highlight the bugs for BiDi support in FireMonkey and report them to be hopefully fixed in the future releases. The first impression was that FireMonkey is not as bad as VGScene in supporting BiDi text. It was a surprise because I didn’t really expect any BiDi support after reading Andreano’s comment. There is very limited and half baked support for BiDi text in the initial release and it still has a long way to go for fully supporting BiDi text. Here I am going to discuss support for BiDi text in FireMonkey version 1.0, highlighting the bugs which should be fixed regarding this support, and the QC report regarding each bug.

Before I discuss BiDi support, I should mention that according to Michael Swindell, Senior vice president of marketing and product management at Embarcadero, FireMonkey will be updated frequently. The first update is expected before the end of September, and the other updates will be published more often than quarterly [Source]. That means, we will see several updates for FireMonkey before the new version of RAD Studio is published next year. That is really exciting and makes me very hopeful that all or at least many of the bugs mentioned here might be fixed before the next major release of RAD Studio in 2012. It is important to be hopeful about evolution of a product, and feel that your feedbacks are really considered by its developers. Years ago many of my friends tried to notify Borland about some of the existing bugs in VCL regarding BiDi and right-to-left languages support, but they never got fixed, and many of those guys migrated to .NET, abandoning Delphi. I myself stopped reporting any new bug to QC when Embarcadero deleted my EDN account just because my country in my profile was mentioned as Iran. Now I feel the team listens more to user feedbacks. It doesn’t really matter if I am Iranian or American or whatever when I am reporting a bug or when I am discussing some technical stuff. Anyways, that is another story and I discussed that in an older blog post. Let’s go back to FireMonkey and its support for BiDi text:

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RAD Studio XE2 is released!

Eventually RAD Studio XE2 is RTMed and ready for download. There is a good article in the online documentation wiki about what’s new in Delphi and C++ Builder XE2. You can also view the features matrix for different editions here.

And here  is download link for the 30-days trial version from Embarcadero. Before installing the final version, if you already have XE2 beta installed, make sure you uninstall it completely and remove all of its folders which might remain undeleted; otherwise, you might have to deal with weird installation issues.

I hope this will be a new start for Delphi

FireMonkey and support for bi-directional text

If you are following Delphi news, you probably know that Delphi XE2 is supposed to be released very soon, and it has many exciting features. One of the important new features introduced in Delphi XE2 is its GPU-accelerated, vector-based GUI framework; FireMonkey. I talked about XE2 and FireMonkey in the previous post, but since it is not officially released yet, I am not sure if FireMonkey will have any support for bi-directional (BiDi) text and Right-to-Left languages. A few days ago, I asked Andreano Lanusse in his blog post about this, but I received no reply. Well, I knew FireMonkey is based on existing KSDev VGScene component which was purchased by Embarcadero earlier this year. I had played with VGScene a while ago; however, I couldn’t remember if it had any support for bi-directional text. Anyhow, I decided to install a copy of the last published version of VGScene (4.2) on Delphi XE to see what kind of support for BiDi text languages it provides.

Before I describe my experience with VGScene, let me explain what supporting bi-directional text really means, why is it important, and what kind of support for it exists in MS Windows…

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Waiting for Delphi XE2 with excitement

Delphi world is full of good news these days. Delphi XE2 is announced officially a couple of days ago, and it is supposed to bring some lovely features

It was obvious that XE2 will bring 64-bits support to Delphi, along with supporting Mac OS as a new target platform. Mac OS support was supposed to be added to Delphi XE, but it was postponed to this release. Although 64-bits and Mac OS support are cool, they were both expected. The big news was FireMonkey!

When Embarcadero announced their plan for adding Mac OS support, the original plan was a continuation of the old CLX framework which was based on Qt. The difference was, the new CLX was supposed to bring just cross-compiling for Mac OS (and later on Linux), not like original CLX which had a Linux-based IDE (Kylix) for compiling the same source code for Linux. However the plan changed, Embarcadero bought KSDev company, creator of VGScene and DXScene components, and hired its programmer. They decided to provide a vector-based, GPU accelerated, cross-platform GUI framework based on the recently bought KSDev products; and that is FireMonkey.