Re: Wild speculations about the "other" factors

Jon Robertson wrote:

Simon Kissel wrote:

Well, but if Enterprise customers are not 100% .NET (I agree this
isn't really to be expected), but more like .. say 50/50
.NET/native, then with the non-Enterprise customers being 80-90%
native, this means that the focus of the current roadmap is not
balanced

Not necessarily. If you focus exclusively on "Win32", and avoid DOS
and Win16, there were still 6 releases that focused exclusively on a
"Win32" development tool. As many have said here, D7 (and even D6)
were very mature development tools.

There have been 3 releases that included .NET development
capabilities. And only one of those was exclusive to .NET.

(remember, we are talking about 5 .NET-focussed releases in a row
here before a native-code focussed may see the light of day).

No, we're not. There was only ONE .NET "focused" release, Delphi 8.
Delphi 9 had Win32 support. Do you think that came without cost? Do
you think that incorporating the Delphi/Win32 into the new IDE came
without cost? Do you think that providing as many new features of D9
to the Delphi/Win32 personality came without cost?

Delphi 9 was NOT a .NET focused release.

As far as I am concerned, simply adding the existing Win32 as a
personality into BDS did not provide new features over D7: just worse
quality, with a broken help system.

According to the Borland "What's New in Delphi 2005", the main features
were (quoted, in the order Anders listed them in):
- "support for 3 personalities in 1 IDE" (2 of which were .NET related)
- "Easy migration of Win32 to .NET" (this was Borland's vision: native
code will be deprecated in favour of the .NET platform, so we need to
provide a migration path, NOT an interop strategy)
- "support for Unit Namespaces, for..in..do loops, inline functions"
(not sure about inline functions, but the first 2 were driven by .NET)
- "Support for WinForms, ASP.Net Web Forms as well as Borland's own
VCL framework on .NET"
- "Support for heterogeneous database access (using any ADO.NET Data
Adapter, not just BdpDataAdapter)" (ie the future of data access is all
through .NET)
- "Support for refactoring"
- "Support for unit testing with DUnit and NUnit"
- "Support for Enterprise Core Objects II" (.NET only, with Bold, the
Win32 'version', now EOL'd IIRC)
- "Support for ASP.NET with DB Web controls" (more .NET only)

Personally, I would have added the Backup / History feature, as this
was the only thing that I was really interested in.

I think that Simon's description of D2005 as focused primarily on .NET
is entirely fair and accurate.


With BDS 2006, they added a C++ personality. This is a Win32
personality as well, and I'd certainly ask the same questions I asked
above. Does the C++ personality work as well as BCB6 users want it
to? From what I hear, most BCB6 users are disappointed, yet thrilled
to actually have a newer IDE with the knowledge of ongoing, future
updates to their personality.

Delphi 10 was NOT a .NET focused release.

The "Key Feature Highlights" matrix for D2006 shows that most of the
key features are for both versions of Delphi, with the exception of BDP
ADO.NET connection pooling, ASP.NET and ECO III.

IMO, D2006 was certainly more balanced a release than D2005, but the
lack of progress on fundamental Win32 development issues - Win64,
Unicode (please, God, it's 2006, let me have Unicode support), archaic
VCL controls, compiler optimisations etc - tells me where the real
focus is for the dev team.

Simon, it is great that you advocate for more "native" features in
BDS. But please do so with facts, not FUD.

Following on from these releases, the stated main purpose of Highlander
is .NET 2 support.

Given all this, I think your characterisation of Simon's POV as FUD is
unfounded and unfair. It is at least a topic worth discussing, not
simply dismissing.

Ian
.

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