I've been in Scotts Valley this week, little time for keep pushing out my Delphi demos and blog about them. However I wanted to use these 5 minutes at the airport to point out to a very nice blog post from David I on VCL enhancements in XE5, mostly included also in the professional version.

David I lists sensors support (great if you have a new Intel-based tablet with Windows 8) and gives an actual demo of how to use it. FireDAC is the most relevant library for all Delphi database developers, and even if in the Professional version you don't get the enterprise database connectivity, you can take advantage of some great features (starting with the powerful FDMemTable) and also buy it is a separate add on.

Next in the series is the new REST Client library I've blogged about. Notice how this can be used in mobile apps, but it is perfect fit to let your Delphi VCL apps talk with web services. See for example a simple VCL REST client application at blog.marcocantu.com/blog/source_code_vcl_rest_music_client.html. You can see some of the recent benefits at www.embarcadero.com/landing-pages/rad-xe2-to-rad-xe5.

From previous versions you also get features like visual live bindings and VCL styles. If you haven't upgraded to Delphi in a while you'll also gain full Unicode support (at the expense of having to migrate your code, I know) and 64 bit Windows support. And you can take advantage of the current offers that let you upgrade from older versions of Delphi www.embarcadero.com/radoffer.

Finally, let me also dispel a myth. That is, that the Delphi RTL is broken and slow since XE3. While there have been issues in that version (when the team refactored the RTL to make it cross-platform) the large mayoriy of the problems have been addressed, in the various intermediate versions and you'll get even more RTL fixes in a coming XE5 update. I'm not saying we cannot do more, and in fact a key goal of the product after shipping XE5 is to focus on quality, and put some more attention back to the VCL platform.