Delphi 2010

Delphi 2010 RAD Studio provides native Win32 support for Windows 7 features including gesture multi-touch support (and even allow this on Win XP or Vista), unicode strings for Internationalisation as well as Delphi Prism for .NET which allows cross-platform support allowing .NET apps on MacOS via Mono.

see also:

• upgrading to Delphi 2010
• Dr Dobb’s review of Delphi 2010
• Bob Swart’s video tutorials on Delphi 2010 Datasnap includes:
  • using same methods codes to concurrently build various server apps such as VCL server app, console server app, service server app or ISAPI dll server app.
  • you can then build a client app and by adding a TSQLConnection component, set its driver property to Datasnap, it will connect to your Datasnap server app if it is running, and in design time, you right click and can retrieve all exposed server methods within a new unit.
  • you can then use HTTP authentication by creating an HTTPauthenticate event on the server’s DSHTTPServiceAuthenticationManager component which returns valid, then on the client, add DSHTTPLayer to its uses clause, change TSQLConnection.communicationprotocol to http and change its port from 211 (TCP/IP) to an http port (80, or 8080 if you also run a web service on that computer). Make sure you dynamically connect TSQLconnection AFTER setting its DSAuthUser and DSAuthPassword properties. Finally, consider removing backdoor TCP/IP access by removing the DSTCPServerTransport component as methods on the client using a TSQLconnection without http as its protocol can still communicate with the server without http authentication.
  • you can then add a communication filter such as zdlib (included in Delphi) by adding a filter to tcp or http component on the server, and adding DbxCompressionFilter to the uses clause on the client. You can also create your own communication filters essentially by overriding methods of class TTransportFilter – see video for details.
• Delphi Help Library (DeHL) free additional source code for Delphi 2010

Coming in late 2011, cross compile of Win32 apps to MacOS and Linux systems.

Coming in late 2012, Win 64 application development.