What’s new in RAD Studio 11.2?

Embarcadero Technologies has announced the general availability of RAD Studio 11.2 Alexandria, including Delphi 11.2 and C++Builder 11.2.

The RAD Studio 11 Alexandria Release 2 (also known as RAD Studio 11.2) is focused on quality and improvements, continuing to build on the milestone innovations introduced in RAD Studio 11 Alexandria.

RAD Studio 11.2 includes support for the iOS Simulator platform on macOS ARM 64 for the Delphi language, migrates the Delphi Linux debugger to the LLDB technology, and adds some significant new features to the RAD Studio IDE, including Markdown support and a popular customer request to visually indicate inactive code in the code editor.

“RAD Studio 11.2,” Embarcadero Pre-Sales Director Stephen Ball points out, “introduces a collection of usability updates that add up to save every developers seconds, minutes and hour in their week, without changing the way they work”

“We have added several important new features”, Embarcadero Product Manager Marco Cantù adds, “but the core focus of this release has been on quality, in terms of usability, performance and stability, as requested by our customers. The quality focus encompasses all product areas, the IDE, the compilers and toolchains, the UX, RTL, database and Internet libraries and includes both the Delphi and the C++ sides of the product.”

Delphi iOS simulator

RAD Studio 11.2 offers iOS Simulator support for the Delphi language, with the ability to generate iOS Simulator binaries for macOS devices running on ARM-64 (M1 or M2 CPUs). This enables developers to test their Delphi applications on different Apple devices and on multiple form factors using the iOS Simulator, without the need to buy the specific hardware.

According to Marco Cantù, “the availability of specific support for the iOS Simulator in Delphi makes RAD Studio single-source multi-device development tooling complete and the iOS development experience much smoother and faster.”

See it in action here.

Android API Level 32

In this release, the IDE lets you target Android API Level 32 (up from API level 30 in 11.1), which will be required by Google Play in November 2022. Embarcadero has also updated our installer to offer the Eclipse Temurin JDK 11, required by the latest Android SDK tools.

LLDB for Delphi for Linux

Delphi’s Linux toolchain previously used GDB for debugging; in this release, Embarcadero is switching to LLDB, which provides a strong quality improvement both in features and in Delphi language syntax support. They have also upgraded to version 12 of LLDB and adopted it for the iOS Simulator, along with the existing use of LLDB for C++ Win64, and Delphi macOS, iOS, and Android 64 platforms.

IDE Support for Markdown Documents and a VCL-Based HTML Preview

You can open and edit Markdown (.md) files and see a rich text rendered view of it in the Preview tab. The Markdown rendering includes support for tables and other special tags.

Similarly, HTML files are rendered as formatted HTML within the IDE with a new native VCL-based viewer. Like Markdown, you cannot edit HTML in the formatted preview, but users can edit both HTML and Markdown in the code editor.

Furthermore, the Project Page Options dialog now allows users to specify a Markdown file in alternative to an HTML file as the “project page” or readme that automatically shows when users open a project in RAD Studio.

Embarcadero Product Manager David Millington points out that “the Help Insight and Markdown views, which use HTML, really show the power of native Delphi implementations. By moving away from using heavyweight embedded web browsers and replacing them with an HTML renderer implemented in Delphi itself, the RAD Studio IDE has benefited with high quality and performance.”

Hundreds of Quality Improvements

“We have implemented over 30 feature requests from Quality Portal,” Marco Cantù notes, “and fixed over 420 bugs reported by customers on that site, encompassing all areas of the product.”

“RAD Studio 11.2,” David Millington adds, “focuses on the details that matter. Together, these many small details add up to big leaps in quality and developer productivity.”

How to find out more

For more details on the new features, watch the Embarcadero webinar replay.

For more information about 11.2 licensing, contact our Grey Matter Embarcadero licensing specialists through [email protected]. More information is also available on the Embarcadero page on our website. You can also buy new licences on our webshop.

About Embarcadero Technologies

Embarcadero builds tools that solve productivity problems for application developers. The company’s products allow users to design, build and run applications from a single code base across all platforms. Ninety of the Fortune 100 companies and a community of more than three million C++ and Delphi users worldwide rely on Embarcadero’s award-winning products to deliver critical enterprise applications. Embarcadero is a division of Idera, Inc.