Re: Delphi for Obsolete.NET - Microsoft's Plans Realised?

Jolyon Smith wrote:
In article <440d51d8$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, none@xxxxxxxx says...
Delphi has always lagged behind Microsoft platform releases. Some lag is to be expected, but with .NET, this has become terminally worse. The first Delphi to actually support .NET 1 development, rather than hinder it, was D2006, released after .NET 2. Highlander for .NET 2 is not slated for release until after .NET 3. How can Delphi be considered a serious contender for .NET development, when it only supports a platform once it becomes obsolete?

I wonder if the penny is starting to drop among the development community.....
<snip>
And with their ownership of the .net specification, if an up-start little ISV starts getting too much of a stake in the .net tools market, Microsoft can choose to break something, having ensured in a prior patch to their own tools that the breakage will not affect those, but only tools from the up-start ISV.

Ditto for mono, and any other attempt to make it into what .net should be, even if MSFT wants to deny . net its potential as an X Platform language.

I can't help but wonder if perhaps Borland saw the writing on the wall and decided to get out while they still had their reputation as a top-
notch tools vendor (some would say, having rescued that reputation with BDS2006), knowing that as .net gained presence in the marketplace, the game was up for Borland and their ilk.

I think Borland saw somethin written on the wall, perhaps it was the decent & free IDE's that are around squeezing the IDE market. MSFT doesn't depend on development tools, they have other products to support them. Right now they are giving express versions of their tools away in order to get people into the .Net fold.

As far as intent and purpose goes, this is pure speculation on my part, but the more I think about it, whether it was the intent at the outset or not, the effect certainly seems to be to make ISV's more dependent on Microsoft than ever before.

I think without a doubt, the birth of .net was purely strategic. Whether it was because they were concerned about MSFT being split into two and they wanted to keep control of .net on the application side, or they were losing market share to Java, or whether people were talking too much about multi-platform, or a number of other reasons.

Either way, I don't believe that MSFT has the interests of programmers at heart. They are more interested in keeping you from going to the other side (linux, java, whatever), than giving you what you want.
..net is sold as having the ability to be cross platform, while never actually giving you that option. Mono will never be on the ball, and MSFT is betting that people will develop in .net for XPlatform capabilities, and stay with windows because mono isn't up to par. MSFT want you to be locked in to .net, not to have the best tools you can have, writing solutions that can be deployed on the most suitable hardware / OS. I think there is great potential there for Delphi to be a Win32 / Linux / (Mac OS?)/ .net platform IDE provider.

I see people advocating .net, and wonder if they do know that soylent green is people, and that Damon Killian is Lying to you. If so, doesn't it make you a little uncomfortable when you eat your green TV dinners while watching The Running Man?

Cheers,

Andy Gibson
.

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