RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria now available
News|by Leanne Bevan|16 March 2022
We are excited to announce that Embarcadero has released RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria, along with Delphi 11.1 and C++Builder 11.1.
As Embarcadero's Marco Cantu explains in his blog about the release, 11.1 focuses on usability, performance and stability, as well as some new functionality, such as the new database drivers and support for operating systems - Windows 11, macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15 and Android 12.
IDE improvements
The RAD Studio IDE has been the core focus of the 11.1 release and includes:
- Extensive high DPI IDE quality enhancements, plus improved use of the IDE with remote desktop
- Improvements to the 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 (see the example below)
- GetIt Library Manager enhancements with cached images and a reworked UI implementation which is based on the VCL TControlList component (see example below)
New features in the IDE include:
- The Messages view uses different colours for compiler errors, messages, and hints to better highlights issues (the colours can be customised)
- The new Items dialogue shows the available platforms for each item
- The Compile dialogue shows the platform and build configuration used by the current compilation
Code Insight
Another significant quality focus area of RAD Studio 11.1 is Code Insight for both the Delphi and C++ languages.
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 Embarcadero is actively working on with further focused updates likely to come 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 have improved 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. Plus, the RAD Studio binaries and runtime packages are now built with these settings enabled.
Besides 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.
Plus, 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
The core Delphi RTL has had several optimisations and quality improvements in this 11.1 release. 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.
FireMonkey quality work was centred 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.
Find out more
As an Embarcadero Master Reseller, we are here to support you with all your Embarcadero licensing needs and enquiries. We are delighted to offer 10% off Professional Edition, 15% off Enterprise and 20% off Architect Edition of RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder (terms and conditions apply of course) until 31 March 2022. You can contact us or buy them now on our webshop.
Fill out the form below if you have any enquiries and one of our Embarcadero licensing experts will be in touch.