Install D5 (& third party comps) on a machine with Delphi 2007?

Question

I've got a Delphi 2007 VM which includes a reasonably up-to-date Report Builder and Dev Express Suite. I use it for a particular project for a particular client.

For that same client, I also have a D5 VM which just so happens to use a (different, older) version of Report Builder and a different (older) version of some of the Dev Express components.

It would make testing and general maintenance of my work for this client a lot more straightforward if I could install D5 (and the versions of the components it uses) onto the D2007 VM, and have one 'uber VM' that contained everything for that client. Naturally I'd have to keep the various versions of the components 'separate'.

Hope you haven't all drifted off to sleep with boredom yet - just wondered if there were any tricks or tips I should be aware of before I try to do this. I figured that putting D5 onto the D2007 machine would be easier (larger existing VM drive etc, plus avoiding the process of re-registering a D2007 installation etc), but in if would be easier to add D2007 to D5 then I could do it that way round I guess.

Any advice? :-)

Answer 1

Multiple Delphi versions do coexist quite nicely if you install them in the correct order, newer versions after older ones. This is something that holds for VMs just as for real machines. If you have a VM manager with snapshot capabilities you could try to install Delphi 5 over Delphi 2007 and see whether anything breaks - if so you simply revert to the snapshot. However, since setting up a new VM isn't a big task I would do that instead and install Delphi versions in the recommended order.

Multiple versions of component sets can be installed as well, each into its own directory. Only one of them can be registered inside one IDE, obviously, but you can use different versions for different IDE versions. If you have an installer that gives you trouble you can always install Delphi and the component sets in one account and develop in another account. Installers do generally write only to the machine and current user registry hives, so running Delphi in another account allows you to install packages manually. Be sure to build the packages in Delphi-version-specific directories - even though most packages have version-specific package files all other source files have the same name and need to be rebuilt for each Delphi version.