Yesterday I attended a Delphi 2010 talk and made a bunch of notes I intend to blog about. Trouble is I have a few minutes now on the train, so just want to make one point.
In Delphi 2010, if you press f6, you get IDE insight. This is an incremental search into a context sensitive map of options from where you are. So I have a new project and I want to import some XML - I type in XML I get
Bloody brilliant.
Now I have always argued that there is a problem with the growth of any product, they start off small, easy to master and end up with millions of options. How does any new developer master the package when they are faced with a wall of options?
Delphi 1 had maybe 50 menu items in total, D2010 has a million. In the Paradox for Windows days, it had two modes, beginner and advanced and the IDE grew / shrank as you switched between them - this was a really good feature when training people how to use the product. I used to teach the 5 day Delphi Client Server course, now it would need to be a 20 day course!
This power is great for me, but pitty the newbie!
So this is an excellent attempt at making the "problem domain" smaller for newbies - no routing through menus / ribbons / help / readme's / google. Now it isn't perfect, like it doesn't tell you what you could have if you were in a different place (like a line below which you get a search all), so some options may be hidden from view if you aren't for instance in the code editor or whatever.
Anyway, hopefully post in a couple of hours / days about the overall D2010 presentation in Manchester and my ruminations.