Porting a unicode enabled Delphi 2006 application to Delphi 2009

Question

I have an application which is fully unicode compatible in Delphi 2006. I had replaced all AnsiStrings with WideStrings, replaced all VCL controls with TNT controls, and changed all string functions from AnsiStrings to WideStrings. It looks like all that work was for nothing, because I'm going to have to reverse it all. Is there anyway to Trick Delphi 2009 into thinking Widestrings are in fact UnicodeStrings?

Answer 1

No, there really isn't. But you won't regret the work to truly Unicode enable your application.

The TNT controls can easily be replaced with the regular VCL controls. You can do that pretty simply using the wizard from GExperts (http://www.gexperts.org) that replaces one control type with another automatically.

Then, you can change all your WideString declarations to regular strings. String is now an alias for UnicodeString, and so all your strings can hold Unicode data just fine.

BTW, the author of the TNT controls, Troy Wolbrink, now vastly prefers Delphi 2009 over his own controls.

Answer 2

Main advantage of TNT Controls is only that It can work as Ansi program in Windows 9x. It is not full unicode. If you want full unicode support everywhere (such as Stringlist.LoadFromFile, Form.OnKeyPress) it's good to move to Delphi 2009.

Answer 3

I have done the same thing in an application that used different XML files as input. In my case, I was working with UTF-8 (so we could use regular strings) throughout the program and only converted to WideString for display purposes (TNT controls).

I removed the conversions back and forth between WideString and UTF-8 and replaced the TNT controls with regular VCL controls by hand since there were only a handful of forms.

The conversion took about an hour with testing. The code is simpler and the program is noticeably faster.