Re: Why aren't you upgrading?
- From: "Joe Average" <someone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 16:19:14 +1000
The only things I don't like about BDS2006 are:
The help is useless, now use a delphiuk website for most help features
Image editor disappeared - would rather have a slightly buggy image editor
than none and the 3rd party ones were pretty much useless
Don't like the Starteam toolbar
Screen seems to get cluttered
Advantages are:
the line up tools in the forms editor are a great help
tools pallette is cool
improved editing features are good, especially with the castalia addon
Cbuilder compiler faster
"Jolyon Smith" <jsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1f8f19a9564426e6989a69@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <4524361f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Nick Hodges
(Borland/DTG) says...
Why aren't you upgrading?
Because you didn't offer an upgrade path to the product I was interested
in upgrading too. Which has spectacularly back-fired.
I started out not needing .net currently, and couldn't justify the price
tag of a BDS upgrade in order to enjoy only 25% of the languages it
supports (Delphi.32)
Never-the-less, hearing "good things" about BDS 2006 (vs the mess that
had been D8 and 2005) I downloaded and installed the BDS Trial, the
operation of which was ridiculous - of the 30 days granted to try it, I
only had 2 or 3 useful days. Overall the experience was merely a huge
waste of my broadband download data limit.
I did however discover FastMM as a result of the experience, and am now
happily using that as a matter of course in D7 and indeed D5 projects!
Turbo Delphi.32 Pro looked promising, especially given the announced
price point, giving rise to an expectation that an upgrade from D7 would
be significantly cheaper than the upgrade to BDS, and hence obviously
more attractive (especially given the stated re-juvenated interest in
caring about "the little guys").
The Turbo Explorer gave me time to play properly that the BDS Trial did
not.
Bottom line, I found very little to excite me. The Form Designer
Guidelines are neat, but not compelling. The Component Palette stinks
to high heaven, and overall in even the relatively short time I had
playing in the IDE I encountered errors and instability issues and poor
performance and so went running home to D7.
More importantly perhaps, the overall impression that I got from the
"Turbo" experience was that it reeked of slapping a new label on the
box, doing some clumsy (and incomplete) search and replace rebranding,
and hurriedly launching a product in a desperate attempt (yes,
"desperate" is how it seemed) to recover something from a hopelessly
messed up situation arising from mistakes of previous years.
So overall confidence in Borland and Delphi going forward was shaken.
In the meantime however, since I now had .net installed anyway, I
started doing some more digging into the options for .net development
and stumbled across Chrome.
Immediately excitement reached levels not felt since first playing with
Delphi 1.0 - all of the concerns and niggling doubts I had had every
time I had sat down intent on finding out how Delphi.net hung together
crystallised in my mind.
Where Delphi 1.0 was a revolution (and revelation), providing a
fantastic way to deliver Windows appications, Delphi.net was more
concerned with providing a vehicle for porting Win32 to .net, not a
great new vehicle for delivering new .net apps.
I wasn't looking to Delphi.net to see how I could keep doing the same
old things, I wanted to see how Delphi made .net more exciting and
easier/more fun/more powerful to work with than the alternatives.
Chrome on the other hand showed how Delphi could have been.
If nothing elses, Delphi.net is stuck in .net history (1.1 framework),
rather than being at the cutting edge, which in itself spake volumes
when considering Delphi for the long term (i.e. .net - for Win32 D7 was
keeping me more than satisfied).
The game plan that had evolved to this point HAD been:
- Stick with D7 for now and see what the Turbo Edition of
Highlander has to offer (assuming there is one), and maybe
by then I will have need of the .net stuff too, so an
upgrade to BDS will make sense if I still am not offered
an upgrade to Turbo.
But, having experienced Turbo and discovering Chrome, the gameplan NOW
is:
- Stick with D7 for Win32
- Move to Chrome for .net when necessary
I can do some useful work (i.e. primarily "learning") in Chrome for free
with the command line compiler, and when the time comes can purchase
Chrome with VS (bizarrely I can take advantage of upgrade pricing with
Chrome, yet not with Borland!) for E199.
Note that even /without/ the competitive upgrade pricing, a wholly new
Chrome & Visual Studio license would cost me only 249 Euro. Compared to
384 Euros for the Turbos (using the UK online shop site as price
reference, rahter than the perhaps more apt NZ/Oz size - don't ask me
why, there was no particular reason for that it's just how it ended up)
+0.02
--
Jolyon Smith
.
- References:
- Why aren't you upgrading?
- From: Nick Hodges (Borland/DTG)
- Re: Why aren't you upgrading?
- From: Jolyon Smith
- Why aren't you upgrading?
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