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.
I second that – just recently switched from C++Builder to VS2005 C#, and am finding around 2x productivity. That is sweet!
I work for a serious corporation and we are extremly happy with the new way Borland is working with Delphi, starting with a good roadmap and focusing in getting rid of all those pending bugs looking for a very stable IDE/Language/VCL to work with. The addition of the C++ personality will help our abandomed C++ Builder developers. The IDE developer productivity enhancements go beyond anything VS 05 had to offer, and yes we do have also VS 05, last but not least, ECO is the future of programming.
We are not early adopters, announcing a product and putting up for public Beta testing doesn’t fit nor satisfies a serious development company.
Supporting the win32 customers and also offering a seamless migration path to .net is a great and serious commitment that the developers guided by whisles and fire crackers will never appreciate, nor understand. It is always easy to drop all your software development and just rewrite from zero, its always easy to try to start over than to understand, and there is no more serious mistake than that.
Expecting Borland to be waiting for an unexpected release time, constantly postponed and plague with uncertainty can only lead to a deception.
They admit their mistake on their prior versions and they have publicly committed themselves to quality.
As you said, at the moment you can accomplish that with Delphi 2Kx, but that can’t be extended to a comment like the one entered, to something that you haven’t tried, or by judging a framework that has less than 1 month old.
And no, Beta testing is something that a serious businness can’t develop for.
Big companies have a different pace than small(er) companies. The market I work in, things have to be done yesterday, sometimes with tomorrow’s technology. For now, Borland does not fit that profile.
As for the beta testing: I’d rather have a beta that has its (known) quircks than NO product at all. A lot of clients agree to that.
D8.NET was a beta Delphi2006 as far as I see it.
Agreed on the Delphi 8.Net fiasco.
But VS 05, seems to go on the same way even after months and months of beta testing.
Check this links:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/11/hey-shareholders-vs-2005-is-fantastic.html
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/11/vs-2005-why-do-you-want-to-make.html
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/11/vs-service-packs-big-city-critics-and.html
One thing i must mentioned, your response was clean, quick and accurate, i respect that.
Thanks in advance and keep writting, hopelfuly we will have you back on the good side of the force. 🙂
Esteban,
Software has bugs. Period. Some software has a lot of bugs. The complaints about VS2005 about not really being ready for RTM are probably correct. But the product is here. D2006 is not. Delphi support for .NET 2.0 is even further away. That’s what I don’t like about Borland at the moment. But VS2005 is the lesser evil (although I would not expect to have said that anytime when I bought Delphi in 2001).
Good to see you believe in the force as well. Perhaps I can be turned from the dark side in the future 😉
Cheers!
Reginald