The Fine Art of Software DeliveryI've just wasted four hours of my life i will not get back. What did i do you, you ask? Easy: i tried to upgrade my Delphi 2007 test VM to the latest and greatest CodeGear produce. This is a clean VM we're talking about. Fresh install of Windows XP SP2 with latest Updates. Snapsot. Clone. Fresh Install of Delphi 2007 MK-1. Snapshot. Updated to Delphi 2007 Update 2 some months ago. Snapshot. All had been working fine (or at least, as fine as one has come to expect). 12:00 PM: Booting up. Dragging RadStudio2007Setup.exe over. Running. Entering new Serial; selecting upgrade. OK. 12:05 PM: Noticing my overall system is anything but performant. Indeed, setup inside the VM is managing to drag down the entire 2x4,4GHz, 4GB system with it. Apparently doing nothing. 12:30 PM: Setup (or so foolish me thinks) is finally starting to copy files. At least that's what it looks like - the status panel is rapidly (yet somehow incredibly slowly) showing filename after filename. 12:45 PM: Can't be long now. How many files could setup possibly have to copy, after all? 13:30 PM: Incredibly enough, setup is now starting to download files. What is that you're saying? Wasn't it already installing before? Well, apparently not. 14:30 PM: Setup is still downloading. Setup is also still bigging down the entire system, making it still unusable. Going off to my MacBook to get some stuff done in the meantime 15:00 PM: Checking back for status: Still downloading, and the entire desktop is covered with .7zip files. Of course. Where else would you put temp files, if not on the desktop! How silly of me. 15:15 PM: Apparently done downloading, and installing now (but then, we though it was doing that last week). System still slow as molasses, of course. Teaches me for not buying state of the art hardware. 15:50 PM: Setup done. Repeat: Setup done. Launching! 15:52 PM: Completing Registration and Activaton form. Subitting 15:55 PM: Spash Screen "C++BUILDER". Huh? 15:56 PM: Selecting "Whatever" 15:59 PM: IDE comes up, "Delphi for Win32". I thought (from the splash) it launched C++Builder. Weird. Let's restart 16:03 PM: Splash screen "RAD STUDIO 2007". Better! better? 16:03:20 PM: Failure to load "Together" package. Ignore. Whatever. Who Cares! I don't need Together! 16:03:35 PM: Access Violation. process is gone 16:04 PM: Launching again 16:05 PM: Some *OTHER* package failure. Then the XP "Has encountered a problem" dialog 16:06 PM: Pressing "Reset to Snapshot" button in VMware. So glad i didn't have anything better to do, today. Comments, Pingbacks:
Comment from: Fernando Madruga [Visitor]
 · http://memyselfanddelphi.blogspot.com
Well, I feel sorry for you but I'm glad that someone else did the test!
I'm "stuck" at SP2 for Delphi 2007 even if SP3/4/5 whatever did fix some of the current issues I have with it! It was a similarly painfull experience getting SP2 to install that I'll only be installing it again when CodeGear finally realizes the cr*ppy installer/script they're using and starts acting more professionally about their products. I would expect that the new manager, with his talk of "improving the user experience" was planning on actually *doing* that, but it starts to look as if it's just one of those "key sentences" to shovel around to look good... I've been resisting C# for a LOOONG time now, but adding the lack of Delphi positions and the current inferior state of CodeGear tools and their unwillingness to acknowledge that and fix it, I think my next development tool will *not* be from CodeGear... It's sad, as I really think Delphi *was* a real productivity enhancing tool, but it has fallen soooo behind with so many new bugs added that it's just incredible how they manage to get along with it... I mean, at least in SP2, they even have data corruption bugs! Bugs that will, for no apparent reason, corrupt your package source code requiring you to edit those outside the editor to fix those screwups! And bug reporting? Well, I've had my take at it and even helped for a while to sort some reports foolishly thinking that I was helping, but I gave up on that and on reporting: when I keep seeing so many old reports not even "looked" upon... I hope their Rails tool has the quality that is lacking on both Delphi 2007 and Delphi for PHP: at least they didn't call it Delphi for Rails so that may be a good start... Only time will tell if they are doing too little too late, but I wouldn't be too surprised to find out that Codegear went bust in a couple years... In my POV, they would do better to have a single product that was a REALLY good product as Delphi was in the past, rather than doing so many products that don't have the quality one would expect...  Permalink
09/25/07 @ 17:31
Comment from: Marius [Visitor]
Pritty much what i encountered en endured 4 times (2 mistakes on my part). In the end i was programming in d7 while installing in the background ;-)
It makes me wunder why the install suddenly is that big and slowwwww. Its just an plain old ide with "some" baggage like .net (good for ~2 gigabytes???) :P A Xcopy and registration would be rather quicki would say Permalink
09/25/07 @ 17:33
Comment from: Tom Birch [Visitor]
Did you read the readme.txt which says uninstall CodeGear Rad Studio before installing the update?
I had no problems on my desktop or notebook. It took a while, but I had no problems. Permalink
09/25/07 @ 19:41
Comment from: Roberto Cruz [Visitor]
Well, lucky you that only has loose 4 hours, I been loosing months, because most of our code was developed taking in mind the VCL. Well a total waste of time.
BDS2006 has a bug that forbid to use Delphi with C++, Codegear knows it but do not solve it and continue selling BDS2006. I was testing now RAD2007, same problems, same issues, if you take a look at the assemble code generated bt the crappy compiler you will find that is a mess. Totally crappy, but Codegear insist to do not solve it. Well they sell the advantage of what? Nothing, we loose a lot of money because of this issue, but well CodeGear do not offer a solution instead of that said that they can not reproduce the problem, well I can every time I want. If they do not have testers to build their cases just hire some. Solution none, Codegear has loose a customer and will loose many. Good job for them. Permalink
09/25/07 @ 23:37
Comment from: Donald Shimoda [Visitor]
Solution? Just use a virtual machine and dont get that poor designed update system stop your work (you can run the VM with the working copy and let a second VM do the dirty work) ;). i will blog on that in a few minutes.
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09/28/07 @ 01:43
Comment from: marc hoffman [Member]
Donald: this *was* in a Virtual Machine. The install still managed do render the entire system unusable, speed wise, for four hours.
Tom: DA delivered a setup.exe and key, the very first option in setup was "enter a new key to upgrade". Was it naïve of me to assume that would just work? in hindsight, i guess yes. This is CodeGear, after all. Marius: indeed, yes. We were considering (lobbied, you could say) to switch our setups to InstallAware, a short while ago. Man, am i glad we didn't, if that is what results. Whatever happened to just copying the files, making a few registry adjustments and being done with it? How hard can it be (and how much CPU resources) to install an app? Permalink
09/28/07 @ 09:47
Comment from: Olaf H. [Visitor]
After having installed Delphi 2007 successfully I recently ran into a situation where installation of CDS 2007 seemed to have frozen. Looking at the status bar it seemed that the installer tried to install the .NET 2.0 SDK. So I canceled the install and installed the .NET SDK 2.0 manually using a download from Microsoft (this is what I did before installing Delphi 2007). Afterwards, when I restarted the CDS 2007 installation, it ran smoothly and did not take an exceptionally long time. I therefore recommend to install all the non CodeGear parts of the install (.NET Framework 2.0, .NET SDK 2.0, ...) manually before starting the CDS installer.
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09/30/07 @ 11:03 Leave a comment:
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