Delphi 6 IDE and apps working on windows 7 64 bit?

Question

I have a commercial app that is developed with Delphi 6. Ive been developing under windows xp 32 bit, but am about to get a new development machine with Windows 7 64 bit.

Will Delphi 6 install and work in the new environment ?

The developed app also uses the BDE, on vista I couldnt get it to work at all, which meant my customers had to remain on windows xp. I dont want this to be the case for windows 7. Does the BDE have any problems working with windows 7 ?

(or is it best to use virtualisation )

Solution 1

My development machine has been running Windows 7 64-bit for almost a year now, with UAC enabled. I do daily development in Delphi 6 without problem. I do have one recommendation, but this holds true for installing any version of Delphi before Delphi 2007 on Vista or higher:

Rather than installing to \Program Files, install to a non-system protected folder. For example, I installed Delphi 6 to C:\Programs\Borland\Delphi6\ (and the Common Files folder to C:\Programs\Common Files). This avoids the problems related to Delphi 6 not being UAC friendly. The file virtualization feature, where Windows redirects \Program File writes to a virtual store causes additional confusion for Delphi 6. However, the approach I describe works very well.

Solution 2

As Jon Robertson stated in his answer Delphi 6 should work under Windows 7 64-bit. But I would highly recommend to use the Windows 7 Professional edition which comes with XP Mode support. So you get a Windows XP virtual machine. With the free VMware Player you can convert this Virtual PC VM and use it with the VMware Player which provides better performance than the XP Mode.

To work with Delphi in a VM gives you several benefits. So it's very easy to backup your development system and you can easily transfer it to another machine. Another big advantage is, that you can avoid component version conflicts between your products or product versions, if you use separate VMs.

Solution 3

I've got the BDE working on Windows 7 (64-bit), connecting to Oracle 11g and Oracle Express. I use a custom installer though, written in NSIS. It just installs the relevant files and sets up the registry entries.

Comments

[Jon Robertson]

When Windows 7 was first released, we tried using XP Mode for Delphi 6 development. It was a lot of headache and we never got it working. I'm all for virtual environments and doing development within a virtual environment. But with XP Mode, I feel that Microsoft worked so hard to make it transparent that they made it unstable. The idea of a virtual environment is to have isolation. Whereas XP Mode goes out of its way to integrate itself with the host environment.

[David Heffernan]

No need for this at all