IDE Fix Pack 4.7 – Includes support for XE2 Update 4 (February 29, 2012)

The new version of IDE Fix Pack 4.7 is now available. It not only adds support for XE2 Update 4 but also fixes some performance bottle necks in the the IDE.

With the introduction of the FireMonkey framework in XE2, all DataModules got this new property “ClassGroup”. If it is set to “System.Classes.TPersistent” (the default value) the IDE becomes slower and slower the more components you have installed and the more components (including TFields) you have on that DataModule, if you switch between Code and Design view. This performance issue is now fixed with the new IDE Fix Pack.

Another performance issue that is now fixed is one that I wrote about some time ago. The Component Toolbar slowed down the switch from Code to Design view. So I recommended to disable the CompToolbar IDE package. This is still a valid option but not really necessary anymore.

Back to the “ClassGroup” property. With its introduction the package and palette cache that the IDE uses to delay load components in order to speed up the IDE’s start performance was reduced to absurdity because the first time you open a DataModule, all packages are loaded. So why spend time on the slow package cache anyway. My DDevExtensions IDE plugin has an option to disable the package cache. This option is now obsolete because IDE Fix Pack enforces it. And guess what, the IDE starts faster and opening a Form/DataModule is almost instantaneous because no “cached” packages have to be loaded.

Something that really annoyed me for a long time is that the parenthesis highlighting didn’t work if you had a string literal with a closing or opening parenthesis in it. It always thought that the parenthesis in the string literal was the matching pair. I fixed that.

Did you ever run into the problem that your EXE didn’t start in the debugger if you accidentally imported a DLL function that doesn’t exist, but neither the debugger nor the application showed you the reason for it? Well that is because the IDE changes the default error mode and inherits it to all started processes, so that you don’t see the “Symbol �foo’ was not found in library �bar’” error message. With this IDE Fix Pack version the debugger starts your application with the CREATE_DEFAULT_ERROR_MODE flag.