Borland selling Delphi and JBuilder

 No Responses »
Feb 092006
 

Borland has decided to sell its flagship Borland Developer Studio (Delphi, C++ Builder and C# Builder) and JBuilder to concentrate resources on their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). See this article on Computer Weekly, their press-release, or numerous weblog entries on the Borland site.
When Microsoft lowered its prices for Visual Studio, and other companies like Oracle and IBM are giving away IDE’s, whilst Borland only increased their prices, I knew something was going to happen. Now we all know what it is.

 Posted by at 09:37

Borland Delphi Roadmap

 1 Response »
Nov 092005
 

Don’t take my word for it, but read Borland’s roadmap for Delphi yourself. The .NET 2.0 framework will be supported in Delphi 2006 (to be released somewhere in 2006, at earliest 2 months away). Avalon and Indigo are planned for 2007 (Delphi Longhorn).

 Posted by at 14:47

No more Delphi?

 5 Responses »
Nov 052005
 

Late and recent Borland (the company) developments made me think about writing it again. Delphi2005 was very unstable and slow on my systems, and with some patches and third party solutions in speeding things up, you could (no, I did not use the word: should) have a decent development environment. Delphi2006 is here, and Borland is asking for another upgrade. They are not supporting .NET 2.0 in any way: that will be in their next release, probably Delphi2006.5, or D2007. That basically means how many upgrades until it finally works?

I am a Borland Delphi customer and was very happy with the product until they decided to support .NET. It’s out of their league. Of all .NET IDE’s I’ve tried, Delphi is the one I was least satisfied with. I produced E-Sync in VS.NET in less time with less trouble than I could have done with Delphi, even when being less familiar with C# than with Delphi (Object Pascal).

My advice to the Delphi community. Do a crashcourse C#. You’ll see it’s much like Pascal. Or Java, for that matter. Then buy VS.NET. Convert your Delphi-code to C#, and create new applications in C#. In the end you’ll save yourself a lot of time, you’ll be able to support .NET better and more stable, and you will have satisfied customers. How does that sound? Sounds good to me.

 Posted by at 02:36

Altova’s XML engine: for free!

 1 Response »
Jul 282005
 

Altova, creator of XMLSpy, has started to release their XML engine for free. The download includes the XML validating parser, the XSLT 1.0 engine, the XSLT 2.0 engine (schema-aware) and the XQuery 1.0 engine, and can be used from COM, Java and .NET. Read this page for more information.

 Posted by at 14:56

Where is Michael Slinn?

 No Responses »
Apr 292005
 

I’m not sure what happened, but Michael only just entered the Borland-buildings when he blogged his revolutionairy ideas about new Delphi2005 SKU’s. The discussion (in the comments) soon was removed, and all that was left was a “thanks, it was a contributing discussion”. I’m not sure contributing to what, since his blog is empty now….

I sure hope he’s not fired or something?!

Update (11-05-2005): it’s almost 2 weeks later, and no sign of Michael yet. No blogentry, no nothing.

 Posted by at 13:55

Choices we make, or: why not VCL.NET

 No Responses »
Apr 182005
 

Perry blogs about choices developers make. In this case, the choice between Delphi2005 and VS.NET 2003/2005. Is it me, or is he asking the wrong questions to have the arguments come out in favor of Delphi2005?

My take on this at the moment is that I spend a lot of time looking how the .NET framework works, whereas using Delphi2005 would give me VCL.NET, that I know since it’s similar to good old VCL. But choosing a non-VCL.NET project in Delphi2005 would give me the same problem: I’m not too familiair yet with the .NET Framework.
Other than that, I’ve found VS.NET a very mature and stable IDE, so it’s getting me things done.

Why not choose VCL.NET, you might ask? Well, I think a big feature of .NET is the freedom the developer has to choose its tools. Using VCL.NET would restrict me and others to Borland. When I use standard Windows.Forms, it does not matter whether I use VS.NET, Delphi2005, perl.NET or whatever: the code can be compiled, or with minimal effort translated. Depending on proprietary libraries/assemblies ties your hands, as most of us will have experienced to some degree in the past. Giving you a new version (VCL.NET) of a well-known trick (VCL) seems like a good idea for a developer, since you can “port” your code with no or minimal effort. But basically it’s just another way of saying: I’m bound to one tool, and one tool only.

 Posted by at 13:52

Bitten by “private”

 No Responses »
Apr 082005
 

I’ve just been bitten by private declarations. When doubleclicking a component on a form, let’s say a button, you will be given a framework for the code and you can type what you like. In Delphi, you can reference libraries (without having to use the full prefix) that are in the uses-list. In C# you can not. The generated event (button1_Click) is defined as private, which (I have to look it up for the exact scoping) means that you cannot just use the objects/functions that you thought you’d included by “using” them.

Solution (it’s very simple, I know, but one has to learn one step at a time): create a new function, declared as public, and call that function from the event.

 Posted by at 23:36

What version?

 4 Responses »
Apr 052005
 

As you guys (any galls around?) know by now, I’m evaluating what to upgrade to. Currently I’m a Delphi 6 Enterprise user, and have the choice of upgrading to Delphi2005 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 (or 2005 if I wait any longer…) You’ve read my ramblings and I’m stabilizing in my choice (which is in slight favour of VS.NET on features).

When evaluating, one has access to Borland’s Delphi2005 Architect edition (available as download), and to Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional (available in seperate ways, I got mine from the free Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Resource Kit DVD).

Both Delphi and VS.NET come in several flavours, Delphi’s trial is their biggest, VS.NET’s is Microsoft second biggest (they also got an Architect version above Professional). When I’m trying either product, there is no way in the world that’s gonna tell me: you still can cope with the cheapest version, still the cheapest version, oh oops, now you need the professional version, still professional, compile->run, professional version is what I need for this kind of project.

Is there an analysis tool for either Delphi2005 or for VS.NET projects to tell you which version one needs? This tool (if it exists) would serve another goal: if you’re going to release your source (for whatever reason), you can tell the users: you need at least this-and-that version of the IDE.

 Posted by at 22:55
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