Since its acquisition by Embarcadero Technologies, Delphi is being renovated constantly by introducing some new features in an attempt to reduce the gap to more modern languages like C#. This tendency could quite probably strengthen Delphi’s position as a development tool for startups.

The present paper relies on the author’s experience with a variety of Delphi versions for Win32, from Borland Delphi 3.0 to Embarcadero Delphi XE, and it summarizes a research aimed at identifying some inadvisable development patterns, as well as suggesting more appropriate techniques.

Use of OOD interfaces as an abstraction strategy

• Unexpected behavior of Delphi interfaces in comparisons and reference-counting
• The way a good tool of abstraction can produce a case-programming coding style

Wrapping and aggregation of interfaces

• Impact of an ability to implement multiple unrelated interfaces

Implementing a generalized “publisher-subscriber” notification system

• Straightforward solution and how it is not very convenient
• Slightly better idea

Ides of debugging

• C0000029 — well hidden but alive
• Stack frames

Source code control

• Dealing with .res files
• What should be kept versioned
• Delphi specific tricks to simplify merging of changes

Making use of MSBuild

• Solutions for several nontrivial tasks