Still haven't migrated your Delphi apps to a Unicode world?

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If you still haven't moved your Delphi applications into the world of <a href="/http://unicode.org/">Unicode</a> strings, you should definitely check out Cary Jensen's Unicode blog post, webinar replay and white paper:
Tags: Cary Jensen Delphi Education Embarcadero Programming RAD Studio Unicode Webinar

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About
Gold User, Rank: 1, Points: 2466
David Intersimone (known to many as David I.) is a passionate and innovative software industry veteran-often referred to as a developer icon-who extols and educates the world on Embarcadero developer tools. He shares his visions as an active member of the industry speaking circuit and is tapped as an expert source by the media. He is a long-standing champion of architects, developers and database professionals and works to ensure that their needs are folded into Embarcadero's strategic product plans. David holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, California.

Comments

  • Guest
    Jeroen Röttink Monday, 2 May 2011

    I requested the on-demand webinar but the live meeting recording seems 'either deleted or expired.'

  • Guest
    Brett Graffin Monday, 2 May 2011

    Unless I am mistaken (since I am still using D2007), don't you have to have D2009 or better to migrate to Unicode. And, if you have D2009+, aren't you forced to convert to Unicode to be able to compile??? So the question in the post should say, "Have you upgraded yet and are you stuck figuring out how to move the code to Unicode". If I am wrong (from what I have read, I don't think I am), then I would have taken D2009/D2010/XE more seriously, since migrating older code to Unicode was one of my fears. The migration documents and links are very good and comprehensive, they are greatly appreciated. And without these, I would have never upgraded, since Unicode is a foreign language to me. And if I am right in the initial statement, it will require that I upgrade to XE2 to do the Unicode migration. Since I will be holding off any XE1 upgrade with XE2 around the corner, the migration of 15 years of projects, plus components, to Unicode is going to be risky, time consuming and expensive. With each year that goes by, and by my skipping each release, the likelihood of doing the XE2 upgrade fades, since it becomes more and more difficult with each year that I choose to skip. I have been starting to feel like I will be rusted into place with D2007. Autodesk, the makers of AutoCAD, has seen this very thing with their new "Yearly Licensing Plan" that was introduced in 2001. A large population of users who had their releases retired just ended up staying with their release and will probably never upgrade, since they now have to repurchase the product from scratch ($4500.00 US). In Delphi's case, it's more than just money ($1500 + $2000 in 3rd party upgrades), but additional time needed to migrate all the code written by me and 3rd party products that have been abandoned. So now it's more than just a Unicode fear issue. And since EMB (and you) were kind in providing these migration documents (I am very appreciative of them), how about providing one more bit of assistance to make the rust finally go away.

    Here's an idea, make a 3 month expiring trial of XE1. This allows D3 to D2007 users to spend this "waiting time" for migrating their code. Work will need to be invested on our parts, but at least without a lot of risk of expense. Plus, we can get a chance to survey what's ahead with coding and migration costs with 3rd party products. If all works out well, then the choice to go to XE2 is a no brainer. All code should be Unicode ready, and a good idea of what is needed with 3rd party products is fully laid out if not already acquired. And in the 3+ months we might even be spoiled to the new IDE, and find it very difficult to go backwards. 64 bit makes XE2 the most attractive update that I, and I'm sure others, have seen in years, but the migration time and expense provides another round of pause that has to be overcome.

  • Guest
    CR Monday, 2 May 2011

    @Brett: "And, if you have D2009+, aren’t you forced to convert to Unicode to be able to compile???"

    Oh, don't tell me, the high road to success is to keep Delphi stuck in the 1990s or something. Java: Unicode. .NET: Unicode. The WWW: essentially Unicode for some years now.

    "Unicode is a foreign language to me"

    Who says you need to care about the intricacies of Unicode? I bet you know next to nothing about multibyte character sets either, even though they were supported by the native string type, RTL and VCL of D3-D2007.

    "coding and migration costs with 3rd party products"

    The biggest problem is with 3rd party abandonware, leaving the user to fix any D2009+ problems him- or herself.

    '64 bit makes XE2 the most attractive update that I, and I’m sure others, have seen in years'

    You sure? Isn't that, like, a C21st century feature that will require systematic code reviews on your part, however well the RTL and VCL manage the changeover?

  • Guest
    David Intersimone Monday, 2 May 2011

    Brett - We will continue to innovate as we see technology and customers moving forward.

    At the same time, when you have XE version of Delphi or C++Builder - you also get older versions of the product to use for your existing projects - http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/previous-versions

    You can also scan all of your source code using Anders Ohlsson's parser to identify areas of code to inspect for the Unicode migration - http://blogs.embarcadero.com/ao/2009/10/09/39042

    By now, most of our 3rd party products are Unicode enabled. If there are still some open source, free or old components you need migrated, send me an email and maybe we can do something to help or point you to alternatives ([email protected]).

    Thanks for the feedback and comments.

  • Guest
    David Intersimone Tuesday, 3 May 2011
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