Press Releases

Embarcadero Technologies
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February 27, 2023

Embarcadero Technologies announces the General Availability of RAD Studio 11.3 Alexandria, including Delphi 11.3 and C++Builder 11.3.

RAD Studio 11 Alexandria Release 3 (also known as RAD Studio 11.3) is focused on quality and improvements in terms of usability, performance and stability, as requested by customers. The release builds on the landmark new features in RAD Studio 11 Alexandria's three previous releases.

According to Product Manager Marco Cantu, "RAD Studio 11.3 offers all the great new features of the 11 Alexandria series, starting with our High DPI IDE and support for styles in the form designer, and includes a much improved version of Delphi LSP, along with many small features making developers work easier."

RAD Studio 11.3 includes support for newer versions of several operating systems, adds a new ToolsAPI to the RAD Studio IDE to customize the way source code is painted in the code editor, introduces a new Biometric Authentication component for mobile platforms, and a number of other features and enhancements.

Updated Target Platform Support

RAD Studio 11.3 offers official support for new versions of many operating systems for which it can build native applications. Specifically, RAD Studio now supports iOS 16 (Delphi only), Android 13, and macOS Ventura, all of which were released after RAD Studio 11.2 GA, in addition to Ubuntu 22 and Windows Server 2022.

Evolved VCL Form Designer and High DPI

RAD Studio 11.3 offers improvements to the High DPI IDE and in particular the VCL Form Designer quality under High DPI, with specific improvements in the scaling of non-visual components, including in frames.

Smarter Code Editor

The IDE code editor now has the ability to highlight matching words. This feature allows you to see instances of the same word you have selected, or the cursor is currently in, highlighted on the screen.

This release also brings a new ToolsAPI for painting in the code editor, which allows developers to customize the editor without affecting its stability. According to C++Builder Product Manager David Milliongton, "a powerful tool is one which can be customized to your needs and workflow, and Delphi and C++Builder have always had a strong community providing plugins and enhancement within the IDE. The new ToolsAPI for the code editor," Milliongton adds, "provides extraordinarily flexible and powerful access to a key area of interaction and productivity within the IDE, and emphasizes our desire to support our customers' innovations and productivity tooling. We can't wait to see what you build with it!"

Improved Code Insight and DelphiLSP

Delphi Code Insight through DelphiLSP sees very significant quality improvements, to further improve our Code Insight features and make them faster and more reliable, including with large applications. These improvements include code completion, Help Insight, and navigation, with a strong focus on overall reliability, as well as providing completion and navigation results and HelpInsight in areas where they were not previously provided.

Better Toolchain

RAD Studio 11.3 ships with a new LLDB-based debugger for macOS Intel and Android 32-bit, which means all non-Windows platform debuggers across Delphi and C++ are now LLDB-based.

"Moving our tools to leverage the power of open source," David Milliongton notes, "such as 11.3 now using the LLDB debugger for all non-Windows platforms, helps us deliver excellent quality to our customers while empowering customers with our productive technology, such as our UI, database, or web libraries, our powerful extensions to C++ and our own Delphi language. All these are well-known for their readability and speed from idea to production."

RAD Studio 11.3 now also offers a new notarization process for macOS, which Apple introduced with XCode 14. The Windows signing support in the IDE now includes the timestamping of MSIX files, while using a library suffix of $(Auto) now also works for C++ projects.

Embedded InterBase Editions & Database Support

RAD Studio now also ships with the recently-released InterBase 2020 Update 4 Developer edition and the IBLite/ToGo edition.

Meanwhile, FireDAC now offers improvements for PostgreSQL database performance and full compatibility with version 14 and version 15.1 of the database. For Oracle and other databases, it offers better treatment of column names with square brackets. For Linux, the database layer offers preliminary support for UTF8 in the database RTL (like for TStringField) and in FireDAC's DataSets.

Biometric Authentication

For FireMonkey mobile applications, RAD Studio 11.3 offers a new Mobile Biometric Authentication component. This component (called TBiometricAuth) provides a means of authorization to use an application or some specific features via Biometrics (e.g., Face ID on iOS devices or Fingerprint on Android devices).

FMX Mobile Device Integration

Another new FireMonkey feature for better mobile device integration is the new IFMXPhoneDialerListenerService interface, which was implemented for Android. The service is intended for tracking changes in the state of the phone system service (Calls, Carrier, CallState).

The FireMonkey library has undergone extensive fixes and improvements, beside the support for newer versions of target operating systems.

Web Technologies

The new release brings improvements to TMultipartContentParser, automatic token refresh to TOAuth2Authenticator, better support for NestedElements in TRESTResponseDataSetAdapter, and fixes in RAD Server, SOAP and other related subsystems.

Enhanced Security

For security reasons, Embarcadero no longer ships the Subversion DLLs, but recommends that users install and maintain their own Subversion client side DLLs.

Quality Improvements

The quality improvements encompass all product areas, with a specific focus on Delphi Code Insight using Delphi LSP, the High DPI IDE introduced in 11.0, and VCL styles. There are notable enhancements in the compilers and toolchains, the Delphi and C++ RTL, VCL, FireMonkey, FireDAC and other database libraries, Internet access and services, including both the Delphi and the C++Builder personalities.

According to Marco Cantu, "RAD Studio 11.3 is a quality focused release delivering increased stability and additional productivity to Delphi and C++ developers relying on our best-in-class VCL Windows 11 UI library and our award-winning FireMonkey single-source multi-device solution targeting the latest Apple and Google operating systems."

"RAD Studio 11.3 demonstrates our commitment to quality, with attention paid to every area of the product, from the debuggers to web to code tooling," David Milliongton adds.

Overall, RAD Studio 11.3 Alexandria implements over 25 feature requests from Quality Portal and fixes over 365 bugs reported by customers on that site, encompassing all areas of the product.