If my first impressions didn’t cover all the aspects of interest to you, why not download the trial yourself and conduct those investigations you feel most relevant to you?

I might yet write a more comprehensive review, but that will only be possible if/when I’ve used it intensively for a meaningful period.

As a developer, I’m primarily interested in the IDE for reliability, ease of use and speed. You already told me it’s FASTER than 2007 (I use 2007 and that is FAST). What is D2009 like in daily use?

Installation, dock/undock and project option issues are not a prime concern.

Please import your D2007 apps, use 2009 for a couple of weeks and then write a usability review from the developer perspective.

Better still, do the same with Visual Studio and then do a comparison.

It doesn’t for me, I don’t like the VS IDE and eclipse is even worse!

Just let me have my palette a la D7, its not sooo hard now is it????

Seriously:
I don’t know about any company to update to D2009 before any service-pack is out.

Though, most of the “2009 budgets” (ruling investments i.e. update strategies) are to be approved until end of November.

And there’s also the “Christmas-gift” business ahead:
after 14 days trials, a frustrated developer could think about asking Santa to kindly provide him with a full license.

I’m not sure if the VM idea will work. Unless things have changed the Trial clock starts ticking from the day you request your trial activation serial #, not the day you actually install the trial. Although I suppose tinkering with the VM system clock would be less disruptive than tinkering with the host machine clock (assuming that the trial expiry trigger can be so easily fooled).

@Rick – As I understand it, the Trial Edition can be “upgraded” to a full installation simply by providing an appropriate license key. I don’t know how SA works – but if you can get your key before you get your official download, but it might be worth pursuing.

@Bruce – thanks for the poll suggestion. And apologies – one of your previous comments on this weeks polls got accidentally deleted when I was deleting a rather large number of spam comments (why auto insurance sites want to link to my blog I’ll never fathom!).

I’ve found now that you can create additional configurations via the Configuration Manager, but only for specific projects. Yet when editing a specific Project’s Options you do not seem able to add new configurations, um options, and you cannot create additional default options.

“Configurations”, “Options” – I still maintain that this whole area is unnecessarily complicated and confusing.

@Kyle – Yes I was aware that a lot of what I had to say – in terms of word count at least – was negative. Unfortunately there is always more to be said about negative points, not least because they really should be substantiated so that others can understand why I consider them negative – they may not have the same priorities or concerns, so can then decide to ignore my “complaint” if they wish.

Positive observations are – ime – less likely to be picked apart and dissected, but there were some of those too!

I confidently expect to have a lot more positive things to say when I get deeper into the new VCL components and language changes.

As far as IDE “phobia” goes, I don’t think the fact that Eclipse is also Visual Studio-like helps much if/when the problem is that the Visual Studio-style is what is disliked, not the fact that it is Visual Studio.

Interestingly, even among people I know who use Visual Studio, many of them don’t particularly like it. They like the features and functionality, but not necessarily the IDE itself.

What Delphi SKU do you use regularly?
- Architect
- Enterprise
- Professional (includes Turbo professional?)
- Personal/Turbo explorer
- None

As for the trial period, I agree that it’s too short. I’d rather see something like 45 or 60 days.