CodeGear says it has completed Delphi 2007, its RAD development tool for Windows. What’s notable about Delphi 2007? First, it’s Win32 only. Borland CodeGear hasn’t yet won over many .NET developers, so it took the decision to concentrate on native code in this release, although CodeGear is not abandoning .NET completely.

Second, it builds apps that work right on Windows Vista.

Third, there’s a new database API (CodeGear calls it an “architecture”) called DBX4; I’ve not investigated this yet. 

Fourth, it’s mostly binary-compatible with Delphi 2006 so that existing add-ins should work.

Fifth, it uses MSBuild (same as Visual Studio 2005), which is good news for anyone with a non-trivial build process.

Delphi 2006 was a huge improvement over the two previous versions (Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005). Version 8 was for .NET only, bypassed by most Delphi developers. 2005 brought .NET and Win32 together, but the IDE was barely usable. 2006 is pretty good; it looks as if 2007 may be better still. Although the feature set is not particularly exciting, the product is said to be faster and more reliable, which is what Delphi developers care about most. I will be reviewing the release shortly and will post links when available.