How hard is it to migrate a project from Delphi 7 to Delphi XE?

delphi delphi-2010 delphi-7 delphi-xe
Rosenberg picture Rosenberg · Apr 17, 2011 · Viewed 19.4k times · Source

Our company have a software that has been in development for over 10 years, so there are some really dated stuff in there. It's still quite functional and everything, but I see the new features on Delphi XE and it makes me want to switch. Problem is that the source code itself is over 300mb of .pas files (1gb total with components, etc).

We're using custom components, old jvcl stuff and the latest devexpress.

How hard can I expect things to be if I decide to migrate from Delphi 7 to Delphi XE?

Thank you.

Answer

kludg picture kludg · Apr 17, 2011

The only real problem is conversion to Unicode. You should learn how Unicode support is implemented in Delphi - start from Marco Cantu White Paper: Delphi and Unicode

It is impossible to estimate the amount of work required to upgrade old applications to Unicode without knowing the actual code. If you were using string types in the standard way, the conversion would be easy. Any low-level tricks with string types (like storing binary data in strings) are now deprecated and the correspondent code should be rewritten.

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