Welcome RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria

Embarcadero is pleased to announce the release of RAD Studio 11 Alexandria Release 1, also known as RAD Studio 11.1, along with Delphi 11.1 and C++Builder 11.1.

The RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria release enhances the great features introduced in RAD Studio 11, with a focus on usability, performance and stability improvements. It also includes some new functionality, including new database drivers. Additionally, the RAD Studio 11.1 release offers official support to operating systems released after 11.0 shipped: Windows 11, macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, and Android 12. Delphi also switches to a new debugger technology on some of the platforms.

In this blog post, we want to highlight some of the main new features and enhancements in RAD 11.1, covering the most relevant quality updates.

IDE Improvements

The RAD Studio IDE is the primary focus of the 11.1 release, with the goal of rounding up the features introduced in recent versions:

• Extensive High DPI IDE quality, plus improved use of the IDE with Remote Desktop
• Improvements with High DPI designers for VCL and FireMonkey and the styled VCL form designer
• The new Welcome Page introduced in 11.0 now offers background images and supports adding custom frames with a new Open Tools API

• GetIt Library Manager enhancements with cached images and a reworked UI implementation (based on the VCL TControlList component)
  

There are also a few new IDE features:

• The Messages view uses different colors for compiler errors, messages, and hints to better highlights issues (the colors can be customized)
  
• The new Items dialog shows the available platforms for each item
  
• The Compile dialog shows the platform and build configuration used by the current compilation
  

Code Insight Across Delphi and C++Builder

Another significant quality focus area of RAD Studio 11.1 is Code Insight for both languages, Delphi and C++.

The C++ language Code Insight implementation, which is based on the Language Server Protocol architecture and cquery, was improved in terms of quality and performance. This is an area we are actively working on and for which we might release a new focused update soon.

The Delphi LSP engine saw big performance improvements, with most projects loading and updating error insight from 5 times to 30 times faster. Other changes include type parameters being shown when completing a class declaration, including T in a generic declaration, and showing set types.

Compilers and Debuggers

The Delphi and C++ compilers for the various platforms were improved in terms of stability and performance. The Delphi and C++Builder window compilers have additional support for ASLR, DEP/NX, and TSAWARE platform security settings, which are now enabled by default. The RAD Studio binaries and runtime packages are now built with these settings enabled.

Regarding debuggers, beside general quality work, the Delphi macOS 64-bit ARM debugger and the Delphi Android 64-bit debugger are now based on the LLDB debugger architecture, which was already in use for the Delphi iOS 64-bit debugger. The intent is to unify the Delphi debuggers on this technology, for most of the supported platforms, as a way to deliver increasingly better quality over time.

Moreover, the C++ STL and RTL improved their quality, including better Delphi RTL integration (for example, improving dynamic arrays with STL iterators).

RTL, UI, and Database Libraries

In the 11.1 Release the core Delphi RTL had several optimizations and quality improvements. There is also a new TURLStream class, a TStream descendant with support for async operations. The product added support for Window 11 and Server 2022 in the TOSVersion data structure.

The VCL quality work focused on recent features, like enhanced TTreeView, TRichEdit, TEdgeBrowser, TLabelledEdit and TNumberBox, flickering and DoubleBuffering, VCL High-DPI and scaling issues.

Additionally, we recently released via GetIt package manager a demo showing the use of the WinUI 3 library in Delphi, a further step in our support for the Windows App SDK (which already includes WebView 2 and MSIX). See https://blogs.embarcadero.com/delphi-winui-3-demo/ for more information.

FireMonkey quality work was centered primarily on TListView quality, improved Android SDK integration, TWebBrowser, Windows HighDPI-related issues, and performance

In terms of database libraries, FireDAC in 11.1 added Structure View integration and offers support for MariaDB 10.6, SQLite SEE, and Firebird 4 new data types. RAD Studio 11.1 also improved DataSnap quality and the ability to deploy a WebBroker application on Android.

Finally, regarding RAD Server, the new release of RAD Studio added SysAdmin endpoints including logs handling, backups management, and database validations, plus integrated deployment for RSLite

Quality

As mentioned, the RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria release focused on quality, and that specifically includes customer reported issues and support escalations. This release provides quality improvements for over 650 publicly reported issues and customer feature requests. (Notice that QP synchronization is not immediate.)

There is More: AWS and Python

We also want to remind you that since the 11.0 release Embarcadero also made available to Enterprise and Architects customers the preview of a new AWS SDK for Delphi (licenced from Appercept): new releases are expected at a constant pace. Moreover, the company started offering free Delphi UI libraries to Python developers, along with promoting libraries to use Python in RAD Studio applications.

You can read more about AWS support at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/appercepts-new-aws-sdk-for-delphi-available-with-rad-studio-and-delphi-enterprise-and-architect/ and about Python integration at https://blogs.embarcadero.com/introduction-to-python-gui-development-with-delphi-for-python-vcl-fmx/

Ready to Go

Product trials for RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder 11 are now available and the updated product builds are live in the online store. Customers on Update Subscription can download and install RAD Studio 11 today using their existing license and will receive an email announcing the new release availability. Downloads are available for download in the new customers portal at https://my.embarcadero.com.

For more information, you can check:

• The What’s New in 11.1 Alexandria website page at https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/whats-new-in-11-alexandria
• The more detailed What’s New page in the DocWiki at https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/11_Alexandria_-_Release_1
• The list of customer reported issues addressed in RAD Studio 11.1 at https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/New_features_and_customer_reported_issues_fixed_in_RAD_Studio_11.1
• The RAD Studio feature matrix at www.embarcadero.com/docs/rad-studio-feature-matrix.pdf
• The updated RAD Studio 11 demos on GitHub at https://github.com/Embarcadero/RADStudio11Demos

Also, you can register for the RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria launch webinar tomorrow, see https://blogs.embarcadero.com/whats-coming-in-rad-studio-join-the-upcoming-webinar/

We are very happy with the quality work our team did for RAD 11.1 and we are certain you’ll equally enjoy using this new version of RAD Studio, C++Builder and Delphi.