"And I got the bits to show for it!"

After a horrible dinner (Bad, evil pizza-like substance. Think spaghetti sauce on inch-and-a-half thick bread with barely warmed cheese and pepperoni. All the "crust" was good for was soaking up the grease. Tom and I abandoned it after a single slice.), everyone jammed into one of the rooms for a whirlwind tour of DiamondBack, their new combined IDE for Delphi.NET, Delphi for Win32, and C#. Yes, finally a new Delphi Win32 compiler. They covered a lot in an hour and fifteen minutes, so much that it went by in a blur:

• Function/Procedure inlining, both in Win32 and .NET. (The Borland .NET compiler does some extra inlining analysis that goes beyond what the JITer does.)
• Finally, a "for x in List do" construct. Only a few years behing there.
• The Delphi 8 IDE got rid of the floating designer. The new IDE brings it right back, to many cheers.
• A new goody called SyncEdit. Select a bunch of code, and terms that show up more than once get underlines. Change one of those underlined terms, and all instances of that term in the selected block change right along with it. This can be a lazy programmers dream...Write up a function with a loop that uses "i' for the counter variable, then change all the i's at once when the code's done to myFancyCounterName. That saves an awful lot of typing.
• Better Undo and Backup stacks, including revision history without StarTeam. The IDE will save a user-definable number of past versions, and you can scroll back through them, revert, and diff revisions, all in the IDE.
• The same IDE debugs Win32 and .NET code, in the same solution, at the same time.
• The CPU view for .NET shows, in one place, the line of Delphi code, the generated IL, and the JITed assembly. Shiny.
• ECO (their model-driven architecture) can now pull in an existing DB and generate business objects and models from it. They did the Northwind DB as a live demo.
• dUnit and nUnit built into the IDE.
• StarTeam built in, too!
• ASP.NET deployment tool looks like Araxis for FTP, highlighting files that are different, missing, etc.
• Built-in "Extract Method". Using that code a lot? Highlight it and click extract, and it generates a method out of it, including figuring out the parameters and their in/out requirements.
• Forget to declare a variable? Right click on it to add it to the var block (and add the var block if it wasn't there).
• Forget to declare a field? See above.
• Got a string literal? Right click to make it a resource string instead.
• Need to rename a class? Ask, and you get a list of all the references to that class, and a confirmation that you want to update those references with the new name.

That's a lot of stuff, and I didn't even mention the 10 minutes of DB-related material. It was hard to take it all in, but they handed us the latest build on the way out, so I now have something to torture on the way home.

Tom and I grabbed a better dinner at a diner down the street. I've got half a ham-and-cheese sandwich ready so I can avoid another lame meal.