After David I keynote at the EKON9 conference in Frankfurt (Germany), Jason Vokes has laid out the details for Dexter. Tomorrow they might show it, but I'll be on a plane travelling back to Italy. Others have blogged on it and will do it again.
Anyway this is the the list of features I had time to jot down. Notice that there is a long list of features for the Delphi personalities (yest, there is C++ stuff as well):
Developer Productivity
- VCL live guidelines (live snap-to guides for positioning and resizing VCL controls at desing time)
- Live Templates, scriptable and extensible
- Block Completion: automatically ends the blocks you begin
- More refactorings
Quality and Performance
- Fastcode memory manager
- Faster startup time (IDE startup and project load)
- More responsive IDE
- Incorporated QC feedback
.NET Enterprise/Database Application Development
- ECO basics in all editions, with object Relational mapping, transparent persistence, object transactions, managed object cache, class modeling
- New ECO III state machines
- Other new ECO features: domain patterns, oveloaded OCL expressions, improved UML designer...
Database Development
- Win32: new database explorer for dbExpress , new unicode dbexpress platform, new and updated dbexpress drivers
- .NET: new BPD connection pooling, BDP SQL tracing, datahub error reconciliation...
Together for Delphi
- LiveSource class diagramming (two-way modeling: changes in code reflec in model and vicevercsa)
- UML diagram suite (class, use case, sequence, collaboration, state chars, deployment, activity, and component diagrams)
- Design patterns support: get started quickly with industry recognized GOF patterns or add your own
- Audits and metrics: gain insight into your source code
- Document generation: generate documentation from your source code and models
Application Lifecycle Management Integration
- Integrated StarTeam User Experience
- Integrated CaliberRM User Experience
- StarTeam Server Standard Edition (in Enterprise and Architect)
Dexter C++ Personality
- Upgrade to C++ Builder 6
- IDE productivity improvements since D7 (database explorer, history managerm sybc edit...)
- New VCL (updates already in Delphi 7 and 2005)
- Rename Refactoring
- CodeGuard 2006
- Configurable Builds (highly configurable and flexible C++ build options)
- IntraWeb RAD C++ Web App Development
- CORBA support