I have been stuck with Delphi 7 for a long time. It seems like most people still do the same. Say, why should we upgrade? Since D7 itself is a very good tools. Most ppl skip Delphi 8, 2005 and 2006. Now, for the CodeGear version, it is really nice. It packs a lots of new feature that an IDE should have, refactoring, smart editing, visual guide, etc. I have a pretty good reason to upgrade to Delphi 2007. However, when I tried doing so, its turn out that CodeRush is not available for Delphi 2007. In fact, CodeRush release no more update for Delphi since D7. (They still have update for VS, alas.) There exists some alternative, Castalia provides much of the same feature as CodeRush. Nevertheless, Delphi 2007 itself has a lots of feature CodeRush originally has. The Live Template is as good as that of CodeRush itself.

Anyway, the feature of CodeRush that I used most is the code navigation feature. CodeRush allow you to jump to any method with just a few click. You simply hit Ctrl + Alt + F and CodeRush pops you a windows with the list of all function in the current unit and you simply type in a name. You also get a smart search. For example, if your method name is OpenNewWindows, you could simply type "newwin" and every method having "newwin" as a substring of its name will show up. That is very handy. It is like you are having launchy or KRunner. And this exact feature is not available in Castalia. How sad.

It is lucky that both CodeRush and Castalia use the Open Tool API which allows a programmer to write plug-ins for the IDE itself. I might look into that somehow. A good starting place might be these.

http://www.gexperts.org/opentools/ http://delphi.about.com/od/objectpascalide/a/wizardsexperts.htm