The Ribbon Control

Now I’m not a major fan of Microsoft’s ribbon control, and our clients have for the most part stuck with Windows XP, and Office 2003, so there has been no real call for it in our applications. However, with the advent of Windows 7, we are getting more and more calls for our application to look more like a Windows 7 and more specifically an Office 2007+ application.

To that end I have been experimenting with the ribbon control in Delphi 2010. And my am I frustrated. This is the buggiest component I have ever used out of the (Delphi) box. I add ribbon groups that disappear (I have found a workaround, by opening the form as a text file and back to form again) Icons initially appeared non-transparent, then started working. Sometimes actions would not have a caption. I’d delete the group, re-add the action, and the caption magically appears. It just seems so fragile. Has anyone actually managed to get anything but a hello world application, using a ribbon control, to actually work. and more importantly, not go nuts in the process.

This is why I protest so loudly at the Delphi pricing. Delphi 2009, touted the ribbon control and generics as two of it’s major plus points. Generics were barely useable until update 3, and then abandoned in Delphi 2009, with new fixes going in Delphi 2010. The ribbon control, I assume, was just as bad in Delphi 2009 as it is in Delphi 2010, if not worse.

Stop releasing new versions every 5 minutes, and fix the outstanding problems. Why should I have to get Delphi 2010 to fix the generics I paid for in Delphi 2009? Why should I now have to find a third-party ribbon control to fix what I paid for in Delphi 2010?

Delphi Generics

Generics was or is one of the flagship features of Delphi 2009. Probably up there with unicode. Unfortunately, I don’t think the time was been put into the feature that it deserves. It feels like a badly implemented third party component. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of communication with the ide. Code completion doesn’t work with generics. Same with class completion. Why not? Refactoring falls over as well.

This was all annoying, but we could almost live with it. Unfortunately we’ve now got a problem, which means we can’t use generics at all. Most of our automated testing is done with Automated QA’s Test Complete. Since we’ve moved to Delphi 2009, we’ve had a major problem, in that the debug information from our Delphi application was not being read properly from Test Complete 7. Here’s my question about it on Stack Overflow. Automated were baffled. We tried writing small test applications, but we couldn’t reproduce the problem. There was something about our application, Test Complete didn’t like. After months of investigation, we finally came to the conclusion that generics was the problem. Luckily, we had actually refactored some of our code to use generics, so it was easy to go back to the previous version. And hey presto, Test Complete is now totally happy.

Automated are now looking at it. I wonder if it’s a Test Complete problem, or is it generics messing up the debug information in the executable?

Generics in Delphi 2009

I've now had Delphi 2009 installed on my machine for about a month, and have been refactoring some code to take full advantage of Generics and Anonymous methods. I really like generics, but am beginning to feel really uncomfortable with the Delphi implementation. It just doesn't feel 100% stable. I get the occasionaly internal error, which then dumps you somewhere at the very beginning or very end of a file, with no indication about what you have done wrong. Try adding the overload keyword to a method in a generic class, without actually overloading the method for example. Code completion is a bit of a mess, sometimes working, and sometimes not. I won't even mention the TDictionary class, which is practically useless, as it is riddled with bugs. Well perhaps not riddled, but there are a few, making it unusable. Try using the enumertors for example.

Why release it when it clearly needed a little more work? When is it going to be fixed?