Deploying Delphi applications

There are now three updates available for Delphi 2005, and I chose to install them all. So far, I haven't installed any updates because all has been working well without.

To get to the latest Update 3, you will fist need to install the cumulative Update 2, and then Update 3 on top of that.

Having done that I wondered why my .NET applications wouldn't start anymore. As the default error messages given by .NET applications aren't very helpful ("Application has generated an exception that could not be handled"), I spent a while figuring why this happened. At last I figured out it must be a DLL problem (I tend to copy the Borland.Delphi.* DLLs to the GAC (Global Assembly Cache).

And indeed, there the problem was. I had read through the Update 3 ReadMe file, but I should have known that this file didn't mention the changes in the previous updates. And, it said in the ReadMe of Update 1 that the DLL versions had changed.

So I checked the GAC, and Delphi 2005 without any updates required the version 9.0.1761.24408 of the Delphi assemblies (like Borland.Delphi.dll) and since Update 1, the version had changed to 9.0.1882.30496.

Luckily, GAC supports multiple versions, and so the problem was solved. Later, once I have all my apps recompiled, I could get rid of the old DLLs. Actually I could do that even sooner, but I don't have the time to test for compatibility.