Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Delphi 6 + build configuration

Delphi 6 misses (at least) one important feature: being able to create\manage build configurations. For my UnCodeX project I want two build configurations: debug (or development) and release. For the simple reason that the debug builds will include debugger information so I can use some tools to find memory leaks and what not. The release builds ofcourse should not contain the debug info and should be optimized. But Delphi 6 was no way to manage the project options\settings. You can have various "desktop" configurations, really don't see the use of that, but not build configurations. So far I've only found one IDE expert that helps me a little bit: GExperts. However, the way I have to use this isn't great at all, the overview of te configuration is completely lost and it doesn't store the alternate configurations on the project. This way I can't include it with the CVS and use the alternate configurations on other machines. This sucks a lot.

I don't know if newer Delphi releases do support management of alternate build cofigurations, I don't have the money to upgrade to a newer Delphi release anyway. Delphi 6 still works well enough for me, except for a couple of annoyances.

If anyone knows of an IDE expert, or maybe an other method, that makes this easier please let me know. Important to note that this tool has to be free (as in beer), or at least with a small price tag, because I don't want to limit people in being able to work on my open source uncodex project.