Ben Smith, CEO of CodeGear, has started a new meme on The 5 Best Things of Delphi 2007. He tagged 5 people, asking them to offer their 5 best, and only one of the five people doesn't work for CodeGear: me (well, somewhat misspelled but I'm used to that). David I has already replied. Here are my 5 things (trying not to be too technical, even though I've been granted beta-blogging status):

  1. The Help file. Not only it is much better than the recent ones, but I find it much better than the Delphi 7 one, with all of the technical details (like the values of enumerated types) properly linked, but also graphical representations of VCL class hierarchies.
  2. The openness around the project. I've never seen so much public technical information (not marketing fluff) about a not-yet-shipped Delphi version. A larger beta, beta bloggers, the CodeRage online conference next week... all this helps letting people know about the new Delphi.
  3. The overall IDE experience, with a much nicer welcome page (with favorites and all), a handy File Explorer pane, faster responsiveness...
  4. The support for Vista. Having written programs in Delphi 7 and Delphi 2006 to support vista UI, I have to say this is not as trivial as people in the non-tech groups are depicting. The Application object behavior had to change for the first time since Delphi 1!
  5. The build process customization, based on MSBuild. Very flexible... although I still have a lot to learn about it.

Now it is my turn to tag 3 others (5 is too many, plus I don't know who is allowed to talk about the product!):

  1. Nick Hodges
  2. Bob Swart
  3. Hallvard Vassbotn