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.
RAD Studio 11.3 includes support for newer versions of several operating systems, adds a new ToolsAPI to the RAD Studio IDE to customizing 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.
What is New in RAD Studio 11.3
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.
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.
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.
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.