ESBPCS for VCL
ESBPCS and Tiburon
Thread Starter: Glenn Crouch Started: 7/23/2008 3:07 PM UTC
Replies: 3
7/23/2008 3:07 PM UTC
ESBPCS and Tiburon
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Glenn Crouch

Hopefully you have heard of the new CodeGear product - codenamed, Tiburon - which is Delphi for native Windows with Unicode support (and more of course).

We have been playing with Tiburon, and are keen to add the Unicode support that it nicely offers.

ESBPCS does have a swag of "low level" string routines that are byte based - so we need to implement alternatives for these when ESBPCS is used on Tiburon, but will still be "happy" with earlier versions of Delphi. This will mostly be handled by the supplied Conditionals - but there is a fair bit of testing involved. We can't guarantee that we will be ready by the time (whenever that is) that Tiburon is released but we should have support out within a few weeks of the release date if not before.

We have also been working on a complete re-do of the Documentation, so that the Help works in the HTMLHelp2 environments.

Also we have several other improvements (not Tiburon related) - and so will probably release a minor update within the next few weeks.

Current thinking is ESBPCS v4.5 by mid-August but probably without new documentation.

ESBPCS v5 with Tiburon support and new Documentation (though this might still be 5.1 before completed - see how we go). With ESBPCS v5 we will probably make it for Delphi 7 and above, and only for the native Windows (not .NET) versions of Delphi.

Note: These will be free upgrades to current ESBPCS registered customers :)


Glenn Crouch, mailto:glenn@esbconsult.com ESB Consultancy, http://www.esbconsult.com Home of ESBPCS, ESB Calculators, ESBStats and ESBPDF Analysis Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia
9/2/2008 4:38 AM UTC
Re: ESBPCS and Tiburon
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Glenn Crouch

Work on the new Documentation is still progressing, as we've found that we really did need to improve things, especially for the Classes/Components.

So here is the updated plan(subject to change - no guarantees):

We hope to have ESBPCS v4.5 out by mid-September, with the new help system - if we do start to fall to far behind we might release v4.4.4 to get out many of the minor updates/fixes that have been done, but we would prefer to include this all in v4.5

We are aiming to have ESBPCS v5 out within 8 to 10 weeks of Delphi 2009 being available - not announced ;-) We had hoped to have ESBPCS Trial on the Partners DVD for Delphi 2009 - as we have for the last several releases - but there is more work involved in properly supporting the Unicode features whilst not "breaking" things for earlier Delphi versions.

ESBPCS v5 will have Unicode support for Delphi 2009 (not earlier as it is "inheriting" the Unicode supplied in Delphi 2009).  With v5 we will be dropping support for versions earlier than Delphi 7, though we will do bug fixes to v4.5 if needed.

Upgrades to v4.5 and v5 will both be free to existing ESBPCS owners.


Glenn Crouch mailto:glenn@esbconsult.com
ESB Consultancy http://www.esbconsult.com
Home of ESBPCS & ESB Calculators
Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia
10/1/2008 8:59 PM UTC
Re: ESBPCS and Tiburon
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Paul_D


I would be happy to pay an upgrade charge.  A lot of vendors have dropped out, and, I have a feeling more will drop out this time, figuring the Unicode effort was too great.  So, I look forward to the update.  No rush on my account, I'm just playing with D2009 so far, my real work is still in 2007 for now.
10/2/2008 7:55 AM UTC
RE: ESBPCS and Tiburon
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Glenn Crouch

> I would be happy to pay an upgrade charge.  A lot of vendors have dropped out, and, I have a feeling more will drop out this time, figuring the Unicode effort was too great.  So, I look forward to the update.  No rush on my account, I'm just playing with D2009 so far, my real work is still in 2007 for now. <<

Our current policy for ESBPCS for VCL is not to charge for upgrades - we use it in our own local client work so we are not totally dependent on sales to cover development costs - but thanks for offering :)

The Help Upgrade is taking far longer than expected as we are going over every routine, method, class and component- on the plus side we are finding some minor bugs / inconsistencies which we are fixing, as well as seeing some areas where we could do some more work in later releases.  


Glenn Crouch, mailto:glenn@esbconsult.com
ESB Consultancy, http://www.esbconsult.com
Home of ESBPCS, ESB Calculators, ESBStats and ESBPDF Analysis
Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia