Re: Captain Jake's Top Ten List of what I'd like to see in thenextversionof Delphi

Randy Magruder wrote:
Um...how about VCL.NET? You know, that little platform-independent
piece that actually runs fast in .NET (as opposed to SlowForms
technology pushed by MS?)

That handcuffs virtually all third party WinForms components? That
isn't supported by ECO itself?

Sure, I'd like to have nice responsiveness in my .NET apps, but I'm not
willing to pay the price for those things. I'd rather just use
WinForms....IMO customers don't care as much about snappy UI's as
developers do. They want something that looks nice and works well.

You know, back when D7 came out and the architect version shipped with
Bold, the biggest problem that I saw was that no one knew what it was,
and since it was the only noticeable difference between Enterprise and
Architect, few people PAID to find out.

The same mistake happened with ECO.

Yep, as Nick pointed out, historically these things move down in the
sku. Unfortunately historically the same results happen with technology
like Bold or DataSnap/Midas. Imagine how many 3rd party components we'd
have now if Bold were in the Pro sku?

The solution, I think, would be to look strongly at some kind of public
beta late in the cycle the way MS did with VS2005. The thing will
expire soon after the commercial release of the product, but it would
give the "army of ones" a chance to freely experiment and play with
ECO, provide solid usability feedback, get addicted to it if possible,
and then turn that addiction into a purchase of a higher SKU.

One possible idea. But why not just eliminate the Architect SKU and
push everything down. DevCo could be about "democratizing high-end
development tools"...just like Borland did with Turbo Pascal. Where are
the barbarians? And yes, I watched Guy Kawasaki ;).

Right now the solution is to download the 30-day evaluation version.
But I don't think 30 days is anywhere near enough to figure out ECO if
it's not your full time job, but something you're just exploring.
Other solutions might involve shipping the ability to do full blown ECO
development, but it only runs inside the IDE if you don't have the
right SKU -- Many third party component vendors adopt this approach.
You get the full benefit of learning it and getting hooked on it
without a nasty time constraing hanging over your head. (which also
sucks because if you get busy, you use up your eval time without
actually being able to evaluate it)

Agreed. A 30-day evaluation is pretty much useless to anyone that is
reasonably busy IMO.

--
Brian Moelk
Brain Endeavor LLC
bmoelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.