I need a new development PC.
Apart from personal taste and Modern UI – are there compelling reasons NOT to run Delphi under Windows 8.1 Pro/Enterprise?
I need a new development PC.
Published
I need a new development PC.
Apart from personal taste and Modern UI – are there compelling reasons NOT to run Delphi under Windows 8.1 Pro/Enterprise?
Not tried it, I am still on win7. If I could get a pair of touch screen monitors then I might upgrade
If there turn out to be problems, you could still run Delphi in a VM of, say, Win 7, from within Windows 8. I would advise installing it in a VM anyway so you can move your setup between machines and upgrades easily.
These could be a pain if you’re unlucky enough to find them:
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=121676
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=120352
http://qc.embarcadero.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=121077
I run vmware with win7 and xe2, the host os I have switched between windows 2012 r1/r2, windows 8.0 and settled on win7. The host os gets reinstalled a lot, the guest is really never. As a general rule, I have always considered EMb to be at least one os revision behind and have found older os.is more stable.
I use a VM (VirtualBox) for each version of Delphi with a shared source code path on the local host and let the host talk to SVN and GIT. Much faster to delete or move a 100GB VM then reinstall everything.
have seen numerous reports of problems with win 8/8.1 re USB ports and drivers….(especially around power management)
I also use VMachines (VirtualBox). Last one is a XE5 under Windows 8.1 (VM with 2 processors / 3 Gb RAM) and works fine.
Running 2010, XE and XE5 on Windows 8.1 at work and everything is fine.
I haven’t used windows 8/8.1 yet, but like others commented, running your dev env inside a VM is a better way than to run it natively, I’d go for a windows 7 VM.
Currently running 2 dev envs on windows 7 x64 with 6GB of RAM assigned to each and work great — still running d2010 here…
Running on Windows 8.1,so far no issues
Does the Android emulator work within a VM?
Lars Fosdal yes, but freakeshly slow in my experience a year or so ago…
Lars, Check the docwiki page for it, no the emulator is not supposed to work in a vm. You have to run it on the host and connect remotely.
Actually I was able to run Bluestacks inside my Windows 7 VM (VirtualBox), with few issues on video, problem was a general delay.
Run it in VM if your computer is fast.
Lars Fosdal
i have a macbook pro here. Running win8.1/Delphi in parallels VM works fine and fast. All emulators (IOS, Android) are installed on the mac osx native. Works fast and well.
Running older versions of Delphi my cause some problems on Windows 8/8.1 (problems with debugging for instance) – but there are fixes from Andreas Hausladen.
But having Hyper-V out of the box and access to the Windows App Certifikation Kit within Visual Studio, is a big plus for having Windows 8/8.1 as the main OS for development.
In what way have you utilized Hyper-V, Fred Ahrens ?
We use Hyper-V mainly for compatibility tests with other Windows versions and for simulating the execution of our applications in environments with limited resources (memory, cpu). It’s also very nice for remote debugging the applications on other Windows versions.
Sometimes we also need Hyper-V to show to our (potential) customers that our software still can be used on XP (yes some of them still use XP and won’t never upgrade).
We did use VMWare before and it took a while to switch to Hyper-V. But now we are very satisfied with Hyper-V.
Jean-Marc Kiener – We are Wintel only.
Lars Fosdal
Same procedure. Run Delphi on a vm and emulators native on your pc.
I did use to run Delphi in a VM for many years, but got so tired of having to hotfix multiple images and dealing with domain issues and performance issues with regards to IPC between VM app and host DB server.
Instead, I wrote proper installation docs for Delphi, components and projects, and started using Delphi environment variable overrides to be able to have two Delphi’s using the same codebase checked out to different locations, and outputting binaries to different locations as well. Changed project configs to use these $(EnvironmentVars) for paths.
These days, I only use VMs when I need to test something that I am afraid will screw up my config.
Getting projects installed and running on a new Delphi version doesn’t take long with the docs to guide.
I am fortunate that we take time to port all projects when we upgrade and keep our sites updated with our last released build, so that we don’t have to deal with hotfixing old version products. Others that doesn’t have this luxury, probably have more use for VMs, to deal with multiple versions of Delphi, and multiple versions of components.