Re: Native Delphi IDE

I.P. Nichols wrote:

Putting aside for the moment your own desire for the continuation of
the current BDS, what do you think is the best *long term* strategy
to persuade new developers, be they Win32 or .NET, to adopt DevCo
as their tool supplier?

I think their current strategy to have an IDE which hosts both Win32
and .NET development environments is the best one to pursue. Its what
their competitors offer, and I think what many customers have come to
expect from a modern IDE. Why should they have to resort to using
separate IDEs when working on a project which may pull together
components of a system implemented using different languages and/or
technologies.

I currently see the main strength of .NET as being in the web
development realm (both web sites and web services). And while it can
be used for client side development too, it is still quite clunky in
comparison to what us Delphi developers are used to, and I think Delphi
Win32 is still the best technology to choose here. And of course, BDS
makes it very easy to mix the two.

IMHO, one of Delphi's most underrated benefits is it's excellent
interoperability options between Win32 and .NET. Additionally it
probably offers the best chance of code reuse and migration for shops
that wish to pursue combined Win32/.NET development projects. This is
one of the main angles I think DevCo can use to attempt to leverage
more market-share. Of course they've already used this angle in the
past, so perhaps they simply need to crank the volume up to 11.

The other main differentiating factor I think BDS currently has is ECO.
Once again, I'd love to see them marketing the heck out of this to the
non-DevCo faithful, as well as providing quality resources and examples
to assist developers in coming up to speed with this wonderful new
framework. This latter point I think can be assisted by the current ECO
development community, and people such as Peter Morris have already
been doing excellent work in this area.

Additionally, having to maintain two separate IDEs would surely mean
that the IDEs would not get the same level of attention that a single
IDE would. I can easily envision a situation where developers would
have to split their time working between the two IDEs. And new features
may have to be implemented twice, especially if Borland were forced to
work within the constraints of not using .NET at all for a Win32 IDE,
and had to go back to square 1ish by using the code for the D7 IDE as a
starting point. Surely that can't be a very cost effective way to
operate.

Not to put you on the spot.<g> but with your knowledge and passion
for BDS have you been able to convert all (or most all) of the
developers in your shop to BDS 2006?

As I've stated here on more than one occasion, our company has chosen
VS2005 as the main IDE for our future development. The primary reason
for this is we need an IDE which supports Compact Framework
development, and also desired to use ASP.NET 2.0 for the next
generation version of one of our main products, which we started
development on a couple of months ago.

Both the company CEO and Systems Architect have stated that the main
reason they didn't choose BDS was the lack of CF and ASP.NET 2.0
support, and had D2006 supported this the decision to switch to VS may
never have happened.

Are your VB developers moving to
Delphi Win32? If not why not?

Because we don't have any VB developers :-)

--
Cheers,
David Clegg
dclegg@xxxxxxxxx
http://cc.borland.com/Author.aspx?ID=72299

QualityCentral. The best way to bug Borland about bugs.
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