Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

Disclaimer: Even though Delphi 2009 has just been announced, this is still a beta blog, as we didn’t get the “golden build” yet.

There are a couple of beta bloggers who already mentioned that the installation process’ speed has been dramatically improved with Delphi 2009. I just wanted to confirm that, so that you guys, desperately waiting for the new Delphi version, can really be sure they did their homework

My test environment is a VMWare virtual machine, running on a 2GB, 2GHz Intel Dual Core host. The guest operating system is Windows 2003 (thanks Lars). I had the setup run off VM’s shared folders. In other words I have some overhead by using a virtual machine and by using a network location as source for the setup files.

For beta versions we are not allowed to post benchmark results, so I’ll got to be a bit vague here. It got much, much faster than it was with Delphi 2007, it’s clearly below the 30 minutes barrier for me now.  Considering that the whole file set is at least 1.3 GB in size everything between 10 – 30 minutes is very acceptable in my opinion.

There is still one point I don’t like so much. It’s probably because of the MSI architecture, so I can’t blame CodeGear for that. When you start the setup to repair or modify your existing installation, then it seems to run through the whole installation process again – even if you just remove one single feature that doesn’t have too many dependencies.  It’s faster than the the initial setup process, but still kind of sluggish – if you just wanted to modify something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 4:16 and is filed under Delphi, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.