After looking at various options, I have decided to move to Delphi XE3 today. Delphi was selected because it seems a fairly easy migration as far as syntax goes with an added benefit of IOS and OSX support.
I'm sure there is not one beta tester that did not report the unit to pixels x/y swap and the fact that this is not corrected in 10.04 was the kick in the butt I needed to shell out the ludicrous money for Delphi.
PB will always have a soft spot in my heart and I do wish they can pull it off, but for now it is farewell.
Carlo
Looks like some of us are leaving the boat, personnaly i put my choice on orthodoxy...
PowerBASIC is not a one size fits all language. Loyalty is one thing, using the wrong tool can be fatal.
I guess If you've already pulled out the wallet then this comes too late, but if you like Pascal as a language there's Lazarus (http://lazarus.freepascal.org/) which provides a free, cross-platform implementation of Pascal (x86 and x64) with an IDE that's very similar to the original Delphi from Borland and a component library that is source compatible with VCLs.
@John: I do mainly financial utilities which could be done in any language. I have a faily big library of code I need to convert so ease of migration was a big deciding factor. I just needed some help to jump.
@Mike: I did look at Lazarus, but decided to go commercial from gut feel :)
Here's a simple Windows program that's a form with an edit (text) control and a button. It takes whatever you enter into the edit control as your name and shows a message box that says "hello" to you. The Change event handler makes sure that the button is only enabled if you have entered some text.
unit Unit1;
interface
uses
Windows, Messages, SysUtils, Classes, Graphics, Controls, Forms, Dialogs,
StdCtrls;
type
TForm1 = class(TForm)
Label1: TLabel;
Edit1: TEdit;
Button1: TButton;
procedure Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
procedure Edit1Change(Sender: TObject);
private
{ Private declarations }
public
{ Public declarations }
end;
var
Form1: TForm1;
implementation
{$R *.DFM}
procedure TForm1.Edit1Change(Sender: TObject);
begin
if Length(Trim(Edit1.Text)) > 0 then Button1.Enabled := true
else Button1.Enabled := false;
end;
procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var strMessage: String;
begin
strMessage := 'Hello, ' + Trim(Edit1.Text);
Application.MessageBox(PChar(strMessage), 'Hello', MB_OK + MB_ICONINFORMATION);
end;
end.
On Windows, I think the issue is that the configuration files for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are stored in the same place (under %LocalAppData%\Lazarus) and that creates a problem. Full disclaimer: I'm no expert with it, and haven't tried this, but if you want both then try installing one version (say the 64-bit version) and rename %LocalAppData%\Lazarus to something like %LocalAppData%\Lazarus64. Then add the command line option --primary-config-path=%LocalAppData%\Lazarus64 so when you start the 64-bit version, it uses that configuration folder. Then install the 32-bit version, and let it use the default.
Basically you have two copies of Lazarus installed, one 64-bit and one 32-bit, but each needs to have its own configuration folder and the --primary-config-path option is how you tell Lazarus were to find that folder. More about that is on their wiki here (http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Multiple_Lazarus).
Take a look at KDW Modulöa, it comes without these problems.
You can find it here:
x64 Alternatives (http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?board=381.0)