How to upgrade from Delphi 2007 to XE2?

Question

We currently use D2007 but are considering an upgrade to XE2. I can think of two "bigger" issues here - the Unicode step from 2007 to 2009 and the whole platform stuff from XE to XE2 (32/64 bit, VCL/Firemonkey with pointer sizes, unit namespacing and whatnot).

AFAIK we also get D2009, D2010 and XE if we buy XE2, so my idea was to tackle the upgrade in two steps:

1. First deal with Unicode. I guess the best way to do this is to upgrade to XE: We would have working generics etc. but no additional issues compared to an upgrade 2007->2009.

2. If step 1 is done and has shown that it works for our customers do XE->XE2.

What do you think? Should we do the whole upgrade in one step instead ? Or two steps but with a different intermediate version?

Edit: I'm aware that XE2 doesn't force us to go cross-platform (FireMonkey probably never will be an option for us). I just want to avoid related issues like "XE2 values of mrAll, mrNoToAll, mrYesToAll and mrClose" while fighting any Unicode related problems. And unit namespacing sounds like quite a hindrance if we were to make our units compatible with both D2007 and XE2 during the transition (or is that a bad idea anyway?).

Answer 1

I would just jump straight to XE2. Just because it supports 64-bit and FireMonkey does not mean you have to use them right away. Just write 32-bit code first and do your Unicode updates as needed, but be mindful of 64-bit when dealing with pointers, memory usage, etc to minimize the need for future migrations when you are ready to tackle 64-bit. Don't even worry about FireMonkey, as that is a completely new framework, so you would be starting from scratch anyway when you make that jump.