Re: DevExpress & D8

From: richard morris (ram_at_devexpress.com)
Date: 05/29/04 

Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 11:18:01 -0700

"Eugene Mayevski [SecureBlackbox]" <mayevski@eldos.org> wrote
> .NET is not doing very well, especially for third-party component
> vendors.

Perhaps your business may not be doing well. Our .NET business is very
healthy thank you very much.

A word of advice: We were the first vendor to produce a .NET component even
before Microsoft shipped the first Visual Studio, yet it has taken that long
to build up the traction required - the .NET market is massive and it takes
more that a better mouetrap to break into it. You are going to have to
summon all your resolve and make a concerted effort for several years if you
expect to become an "overnight sucess".

We are the *ONLY* major VCL vendor to commit to making any of our VCL
components work with VCL.NET, just as we did with CLX (How many UI
components for Kylix from third parties that still exist can you name). We
are the only vendor *ANYWHERE* who *ALREADY* had a set of perfectly good
(award winning actually) native C# .NET controls and *REGARDLESS* made a
commitment to port the VCL eqivalents to VCL.NET despite the fact that WE
DIDN'T HAVE TO, but simply because our customers asked for parallel
compilation of their code to Native and Managed deployments.

We may be spending a lot of resources on C# components but we have not moved
one dimes worth of resources from our Delphi development to do it. We
still have exactly the same number of resource on the Delphi side and we are
not trying to convince any of them to move to C#. Converting a trivial
wrapper over a tEdit or tButton from Delphi for Windows to Delphi for .NET
is a trivial task, converting one of our controls is an entirely different
story because every single one of our controls are written deeply integrated
into windows expressely for uncompromised performance to move to VCL.NET we
have to not only find out how to achieve the same functionality on the .NET
framework, but also the most performant way to do it.

> And QuantumGrid stuff - several people I talked to bought this
> stuff and failed to make use of it due to numerous problems.

Many people I speak to on a daily basis run multi-million dollar companies
based entirely on our QuantumGrid, and Billions of dollars are transacted
each day on applications built using the Quantum grid - I know I built a few
of those before joining Developer Express.

I am surprised that anyone could be stupid enough to think such an obvious
smear wouldn't be challenged on this newsgroup. If you really want to
defame Developer Express, then you are going to have to come up with some
stories that are a little more believable than "the largest VCL vendor is
getting out of Delphi (almost half our business)" or ".NET is not sucessfull
for Developer Express (3rd largest .NET component vendor)" or "The most
popular grid for Delphi (by several orders) is impossible to use". What are
you doing? Waiting for the laugh track??????

Richard Morris, CTO
Developer Express