QA Dept: Help Wanted, Sarcasm and useless comments needed

Correspondent from New York
Follow-up on the article QA Dept: Just want we needed: Less examples


Help Wanted, Sarcasm and useless comments needed.
The state of Delphi Help is so decrepit that people who buy the Delphi XE2 starter edition have no help, no useful code-completion and no community help.


For example, install Visual Studio. Help works (either you get redirected on-line if not installed or off-line MSDN help). Same for Eclipse and other free IDEs. Get help from the MSDN social and you can get helpful answers. Get help from the Java community, don't be surprised an expert will do a web-conference or IRC-chat with you to resolve your issue.


For Delphi, there is this troll mentality that if you need help from the community, you are either not trying hard enough to install your copy of Delphi or noob (newbie) that needs to be trolled at.


In this posting, Ms. Jennifer-Ashley Kuiper buys Delphi XE2 starter edition (or upgraded from Delphi XE starter edition - either way.), installs and gets an access violation when pressing F1 help. Embarcadero speaks about the finest quality assurance and testing done to fix all the damn issues Delphi has, but when it goes to production, the help triggers an access violation.


Then, two well known trolls who like to stalk others, write some comments that the company Ms. Jennifer-Ashley Kuiper works for has this tag logo "The main goal of our company is to exploit development in C and C++. Nothing else." and then "Ah. I guess I need to become a customer of you and behave like you did so that you really see how's that. And then when you start to ask me
questions I immediatelly start to complain about your bad service!" and more sarcastic comments.



Here's the suggested correct answer for Jennifer-Ashley:
1) Embarcadero's newsgroup is a place where trolls feed on newbies with their insensitive comments and silly nit-picking. That's why there are other forums such as StackOverflow.


2) If you installed dotNet, you need to install the full framework. Watch out for aborted or partially completed NET SDK installs. This often happens with InstallAware's web-install which often downloads broken-files. If this happens too many times, download the full ISO files of Delphi XE2 and then re-install.


3) When installing Delphi, it should be installed in versions. E.g., Delphi 2006, then Delphi 2007, then Delphi 2009, Delphi 2010, Delphi XE then Delphi XE2. You should uncheck items not needed, such as IntraWeb, RaveReports, TeeChart if not using.


4) When installing help, make sure you apply them sequentially too. E.g., Delphi 2006 help, Delphi 2007 help, Delphi 2009 help and so on.


5) When installing Delphi with Visual Studio, make sure you install Delphi IDEs first then Visual Studio IDEs.


6) Last, if you are tired of getting no-help and Delphi is not working out, you could raise to your superiors that this is the kind of help and responses you are getting and get everyone to switch to Visual Studio (MFC or QT or C# or VB.NET) or Java.