How to rescue a Delphi project

Delphi has been around a long time and there is a lot of Delphi code around but there aren't so many people around to work on it anymore. Developers are moving onto more modern technologies. To me it looks like the people who continue to maintain this code aren't always the most technically proficient so due to this and the fact that the code is getting long in the tooth means projects are becoming a bit of a mess. These days if I'm asked to look at some Delphi application, it is invariably in a bit of a bad state. So how to deal with this situation? How can these ill projects be rescued? These are the steps I've been taking with the latest bit of code I've been asked to look at. First up, I added all the source to source control. Without source control, you're doomed. There are plenty of source control products around, many of them free. I've been using SourceGear Vault, because it's free for a single user and does averything I need. Next, I attempted to compile the project. The main problem here was libraries I didn't have. Fortunately these were all available free, so I could compile it quite easily. Now it was time to see what the code was actually like. Unsurprisingly it was a bit of a mess. Compiling with hints and warnings on generated several hundred warnings and this was before I noticed somebody had put the {$WARNINGS OFF} compiler directive in several files... Warnings are there to help and can generally be fixed pretty easily, so don't hide them! Fixing these errors took some time but helped to learn about the code. I'd recommend removing all code that is never called and all commented out code, there is no point learning about code that is never actually called. And it's always recoverable from source control. Also searches through the project that throw up commented out code are generally pretty annoying. Another great tool for finding problems in Delphi code is Pascal Analyzer, which finds lots of things that the compiler will miss. Even the trial version has enough functionality to be useful. Reading the code can give you clues about a few things as well. Given that the developers of this code had a habit of leaving in lots of commented out code, my guess is they didn't use any source control. I'm also guessing they started work on this a long time ago, with lots of pointer based operations and references to WinTypes and WinProcs (which if I remember correctly was removed after Delphi 1). So this is where I'm at now. What I need to do now is take this Windows application and convert some parts of it into a web service. This is where it could get interesting...