Version 7 First Impression

[SteveDude]

I've been programming since 1980 - sold my first program in 1981, so there really are very few languages I haven't at least toyed with a little. I looked at Delphi as a language that you would use to create support files for programs written in other languages and not something you would write an entire professional app in. I even cringed a bit using 6.6 knowing it was a Delphi App, but version 7 is changing my look on that old philosphy.

Really Like the new UI. The ribbon bar takes up a little too much screen real estate for my taste, but I think the quick access to key features overrides that inconvenience.

Still having some of the same problems I had in 6.6 building large installs. If the build fails because of file references being changed. You make the corrections and rebuild, the build will hang or at least appear that way towards the end of the procedure. Canceling out of the build requires a system restart and then an immediate rebuild and then it will work fine.

...in any case 7, looks cool and I will be rebuilding several installations over the next couple of days so looking forward to the time in the new version. IA does rock!

[SteveDude]

So far, I have not seen any shorter build times or better compression. Actually everything I have tried so far is exact - build times identical as well a compressed file size exact down to the kilobyte as in 6.6.

I was thinking that build times would be dramatically increased because the copying of files to the build folder is no longer required in "some" circumstances for sngle EXE's. Just haven't found out what and when that "some" comes into play.

[CandiceJones]

When doing a compressed or web based build, the IDE no longer creates exact copies of files to be compressed, since they will not be used as external independent copies anyways; instead the IDE compresses them directly from their source. This can completely eliminate the file copy bottleneck that existed with previous versions of InstallAware during builds.