I figured it might be quite interesting to take an existing web application created in Delphi 2007, move it into Delphi Prism and note down the kinds of changes I had to make. The application consisted of 2 assemblies with data access logic and a webapplication containing around 20 or so webpages.

I decided to break my attempt into two stages. The first stage would see me move the data access code into Delphi Prism, I would then reference those assemblies inside the webapplication from within Delphi 2007. The second and final stage would be moving the webapplication.

As a side note I was using Blackfish as my database and the CodeGear ASP.Net providers. 

I started stage one by creating a solution inside visual studio and adding empty assemblies. I then copied my delphi code into the folders and added them to the project. I then went into the project properties and turned on "allow create constructor calls" in the compatibility tab. Having done that I hit the build button and began the process of getting the assemblies to compile.

I made extensive use of the Delphi Prism wiki to get me up to speed on language changes.

This is a list of changes I made:-

1) I had used classes with static methods. For example

class procedure SomeMethod;static;

Delphi Prism has static classes, so I removed the static keyword from the individual method and set static at the class level.

SomeClass=public static class

2) TObject no longer exists, so I did a search and replace for TObject with object.

3) Delphi automatically makes classes public in assemblies. I went through all the classes and added public before the class

SomeClass=public class

4) The overload keyword isn't required so I removed that.

5) published doesn't exist. So I replaced that with public

6) I had turned on autoboxing {$AUTOBOX ON} in source files. I removed that.

7) I had been using Delphi namespaces quite extensively. For example I had filenames like namespace1.namespace2.namespace3.pas. The unit inside the .pas was the same as the filename.

To other dotnet languages classes inside the file would exist in namespace  namespace1.namespace2.

I decided to leave the filenames as is and shorten the namespace to the above.

8) attributes use := rather than =, so I modified any occurrences of those.

9) I had used for in like this

var
  x:SomeObject;
  objects:System.Collections.Generic.List<SomeObject>;
begin
  for x in objects do
  begin

  end;
end;

Which results in the warnings 

Warning    1    (PW12) Variable "x" may hide existing variable "x"  

Warning    2    (PW5) Local variable unused: "x"   

The scope of x in the loop is limited, so I decided to remove x from the var so that the code became

var
  objects:System.Collections.Generic.List<SomeObject>;
begin
  for x:SomeObject in objects do
  begin

  end;
end;

10) I had declared events as 

property someevent:eventhandler

I changed that to 

    event TagSelected:EventHandler;

11) Setlength doesn't exist

I used this page as a valuable reference and decided to go with this kind of type declaration.

StringArray2 = array[0..] of String;

uValues:= new StringArray2(fieldDescslength);

All in all I would say a very successful transition. I made full use of unit tests that I had and with minimal debugging I was able to get a working web application.

Stage 2 will follow in another post....