should I move to the new Delphi XE Starter?

Question

I am a Turbo pascal/Borland pascal/Delphi developer, since 1987. I currently only use Delphi for maintaining old tools that I (and some friends of mine) use privately. Unfortunately all my professional codes have already been ported, some even with my direct involvement :) to other development languages and environments, sad. OK, sorry for this digressive introduction. Let me get to my question.

I currently own Delphi 7 professional. It was an expensive move, never worth what it costed, just for my hobbyist usage.

Now, this XE Starter edition has appeared. At 149€, it looks like a good deal. It seems that it comes with almost everything I use now, and with some things I miss; unicode and generics, specially.

Do you know if there is any hiden (bad) surprise in this offer? So, should I stay or should I go?

What are in your opinion the pros and cons of such a move?

thanks.

Answer 1

The worst "cons" of Starter is absence of VCL sources (not mentioned in feature matrix, but discussed in blogs