Re: Delphi going strong

"Matt Jacobs" wrote:

I agree, and I hope it happens. But to make it happen they have to
lower the price on the pro version. The pro version competes with the
free VS Express editions, and that's a bad place to compete.

IMO Delphi Pro competes more with VS Standard than with the VS Express
editions but since VS Std has a street price of only about $175 your
admonition of the necessity of a lower price is IMO valid.

IMHO, concentrating upon offering a genuine /alternative/
to what Microsoft is doing with .NET should be the biggest
part of that...again, AFAICS, one of the major reasons why
many MicroISVs are still looking at Delphi /at all/ is as
an alternative to .NET (for whatever reasons)...

The reason mISVs are looking at Delphi is because they don't like the
runtime deployment requirement of .NET. Now, if the .NET runtime was
included on every machine, Delphi would lose its edge to C# in a
heartbeat. But since it isn't, and most mISVs sell their products via
download, the .NET runtime is a real issue.

As we move forward in time the issue of the deployment of the .NET runtime
IMO become more and more a strawman. If you want to say the reality of .NET
applications by MicroISVs will not happen until .NET runtime is included on
every machine I think that's a canard because .NET will *never* be deployed
on all machines. The real question is whose tool set will MicroISVs employ
when they decide to start a new .NET application project as more and more
surely will as time marches forward.

Some people are working to allow .NET to be linked to the EXEs, and if
they can come up with a robust solution, I'm sure it will be popular.

To me that seems to be the worst of both worlds. Do you know the relative
exe sizes of a typical .NET linked exe apps vs the same apps built as a
normal .NET app? It's gotta be really big...

Frankly, if those folk wanted to go down that .NET road then their first
choice virtually every time would be Visual Studio for less
money and with up-to-date framework support.

That is precisely what many want to do, but .NET runtime deployment is
almost a showstopper.

Yesterday Microsoft made the perception of keeping up-to-date with the
framework a little more difficult with the release of the anticipated Vista
beta 2 and at the same time releasing updates for the Win-XP version of
WinFX framework along with the "Orca" extensions for VS 2005 so one can
build WinFX apps on Win-XP that will run on the new Vista beta. It appears
that this release of the WinFX framework is a release candidate do it's
unlikely that breaking changes will occur between now and RTM which is
likely to occur in Nov.

This afternoon I confirmed that a non-trivial 3D WPF app built on Win-XP
will run on Vista, I have XP and Vista dual boot and for the test I put the
same shortcut to the app that I built on my XP OS on both desktops and then
started Vista clicked on the shortcut that pointed to the XP built app and
it ran like a champ.

You can read about that 3D app, including the source code I used to build it
here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060504WPFDL/manifest.xml

Or watch the first 4-5 minutes of the video at this URL:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episodes/en/20060504WPFDL/DanielLehenbauer_300.asx





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