I just checked out the pricing for the XE5 “special” (from XE4) upgrade for Delphi XE5 Professional. It’s a whopping $499 CAD where the “regular” upgrade (Delphi 2010-XE3) is $549 CAD. Considering the XE5 Fix List does not seem to be published yet (Google can’t find it and there are no links in EMBT’s targeted email announcement), it’s a little hard to understand why the XE3 to XE4 upgrade was only $49 where the XE4 to XE5 upgrade is $499 when in both cases the focus appears to be on mobile development, which you do not get with the upgrade.
I called EMBT sales and spoke to Tina. When asked she directed me to the Whats New page and when pressed said she would have to get back to me with the fix list.
What I can infer from the Whats New page is that developers not buying the mobile pack will get a new time picker control, search filtering for TListView, a REST Client Library, REST Debugger tool, expanded FireDAC support for local databases in the Professional edition “…and more” (whatever that means).
So if you’re looking for bug fixes, you might want to wait until the fix list is published before upgrading to see how “special” the upgrade is…
This also begs the question why QC cannot be used to find all the QC items fixed in the latest release. Of course you would at least need a build #.
Addendum:
Tina just emailed me a link to the XE5 Fix List I am pleased to see QC #115925 is fixed as I submitted fixed code to TeeChart for that issue ;-).
There are some 272 bug fixes in the list with some startling regressions including “Dataset closing doesn’t free fields”, “Exception in FMX180.bpl when resizing a Form”,”F4 key will hang IDE”, “Delphi XE4 Update 1 Crash when I add a TDatamodule”,”TSpinEdit will cause access violation in x64 Application”. Lots of the fixes are for FireMonkey and Android, so a desktop developer who doesn’t buy the Mobile kit doesn’t seem to get that much for $499 IMHO. Certainly the infamous “Out of Memory” when compiling large projects, especially project groups is certainly not fixed.
As Tim mentions in his latest post, XE4 is only about 6 months old, so users buying two upgrades for the year would be looking at potentially $1000 CAD if the XE5 price is any indication of what the future holds for XE6. At that price the yearly subscription for Oxygene at $599 for a cross upgrade looks mighty appealing…
Don’t forget that REMObjects Oxygene not only supports .NET, and Mono (including 64 bit OS/X apps), but you can freely download the Oxygene compiler for build servers. Last time I checked, you don’t even get the command line compiler with the Delphi trial which can make installing your components to try to upgrade applications a real royal pain! AFAIK the Delphi OS/X compiler only supports 32 bit EXEs despite OS/X being 64 bit since 2007. Obviously the focus is on mobile platforms and not the desktop where Delphi is strongest.
BTW, when RemObjects released Oxygene 6.1 right on their Whats New page there is a link to the complete change log. Heck you can even look at previous release changes to get a complete list of all changes from your version to the current one. No need to google it, or call customer service. Truly a different customer experience…