Now that Delphi 2005 is shipping one thing that customers who are up-to-date with their Windows Update are surely going to run into when they launch the IDE is a File Download dialog prompting “Do you want to open or save this file?“ where the file in question is default.htm which is the Welcome page. The reason this occurs boils down to the inopportune timing of a Microsoft Windows update release and our shipping Delphi 2005. A similar dialog is displayed when the Help Insight window appears in the code editor and code completion listbox. Allen Bauer has written a few blog entries (here and here) discussing all the gory technical details for those readers so inclined.
I decided to mention the issue here after reading Lino Tadros' article A First Look at Delphi 2005. Specifically, he talks about the above problem under “Delphi 2005: The Not So Good Stuff” section of the article but fails to mention that the workaround is to simply uncheck the “Always ask before opening this type of file“ checkbox on the dialog. I think it's a little unfortunate he decided to so prominently highlight this particular issue with two separate screenshots (both related to the same problem) and no screenshots of what he thought was cool.
Nonetheless, his point is made and I think illustrates the importance of a good first impression no matter how benign the issue and to that end we have a fix for the problem which I believe should be available within a reasonable timeframe. This certainly isn't the first time we've been hit by Mcrosoft patching something as we're signing off and I'm sure it won't be the last.
UPDATE: While I mentioned two other links above I forgot the link to Allen's blog to the entry that started this whole thing off:
Hello? Microsoft Support?