Use Delphi5 in Delphi XE environment

Is it possible to compile a Delphi5 project开发者_开发问答 in the new XE IDE without any migration?

If've been using Delphi5 IDE for quite a while now and, to be honest, it is old, unfriendly and unflexible. I tried out XE and was impressed, however I am not interested in migrating projects to newer versions of Delphi.

So, is it possible? And if not, are there other IDEs that support Delphi5 in that matter?

Unfortunately it's not - Delphi XE is unicode-only. And there are no other IDEs. As for Delphi 5 - that was a great version and we widely use it until now. Try looking for some add-ons and experts for Delphi 5 that make development more comfortable. CodeRush, ModelMaker Explorer are commercial ones, and there were some free addons. Personally I use ModelMaker Explorer for Delphi 5, which I purchased years ago.

In our case it took around 4-5 weeks to migrate our project from D7 to D2010. There are some good links where you can see what kind of code should be modified and think if it worth it in your case, the main difference is the Unicode-issue.

For example, any code that manipulates or does pointer operations on strings should be examined for Unicode compatibility. More specifically, any code that:

• Assumes that SizeOf(Char) is 1

• Assumes that the Length of a string is equal to the number of bytes in
  the string

• Writes or reads strings from some persistent storage or uses a string
  as a data buffer

Take a look at the complete article from Embarcadero

If you buy XE, you're entitled to older versions of the IDE as well (back to D7, IIRC). Delphi 2007 is almost as good an IDE as XE, and it will compile D5 code as long as you have the source with only minor changes. (Typically, having to add Variants to the uses clause is the major issue.)

Andreas Hausladen has a Delphi plugin that offers this sort of functionality (compile in an IDE using a different version of dcc32 than native to that IDE). It's called IDE Compiler Plugin.

However, it's only available Delphi 2007 and 2009. To be frank I think you are better keeping both versions of Delphi installed side by side.