Delphi 10 Seattle

The Delphi XE series broke ground in many ways, not least of which was the FireMonkey GUI to support mobile devices. Updates were fast and furious, and some complained it was hard to keep up with them. XE8 was the last of this line and introduced a new Welcome screen that has carried through to the current version. Delphi 10 Seattle started the "10" series in August 2015 and was named, at least in part, to coincide and align itself with Windows 10.

There weren't any ground-breaking IDE features introduced in the first of the Delphi 10 series, but several important improvements were made in project loading speed, support for large project groups, and high DPI support, especially notable when working with forms at different DPIs. Several menu items were moved for better organization and simplification, and an Editor submenu was added to contain the editor's context menu items. The nicest new feature of the IDE was a convenient Show in Explorer menu item, which will open File Explorer for a file or folder in the Project Manager, as shown:

Figure 1.3 – Delphi 10 Seattle "Show in Explorer" from Project Manager

If you ever purchased the Castalia for Delphi suite of IDE tools from TwoDesk Software, you may recall several nifty features that they added to Delphi. Embarcadero had just acquired Castalia and quickly incorporated many of those features into the editor. These include the following:

• MultiPaste: Pops up a window allowing you to add text before and after each line before pasting (really handy for copying SQL or HTML into your code).
• Project Statistics: Informs you of the time spent in various parts of the IDE, such as designing and editing.
• Navigation Toolbar: A nice way to view and jump to files in the project and sections within the file.
• Sync Prototypes: Make a change to the parameters in the declaration of a class method and it applies those same changes to the implementation.
• Structural Highlighting: Draws lines in the editor to visually depict blocks of code.
• Smart Keys: Adds editor shortcuts, including a fast way to surround code with braces and parentheses.

All of these features have added settings in the options pages.

Other additions included are the following:

• Automatic recovery of files if the IDE crashes while editing
• Being able to change the font size quickly with Ctrl + Num+ and Ctrl + Num-
• The ability to enable High-DPI Awareness in your VCL application
• Several improvements to the Object Inspector, structure view, and the Select Directory dialog
• A new option to hide non-visual components
• Improved memory management allowing the IDE to use up to 4 GB of RAM (up from 2 GB previously)
• Better support for importing old projects even as far back as Delphi 1

Finally, there were several mobile enhancements, as well including a new Android Service project type, background execution on iOS, and an option to allow iOS 9 applications to access non-SSL URLs.