Re: suggestion to increase sale of Delphi 2006

Nathaniel L. Walker wrote:


Without the ability to install 3rd party components into the IDE, it
almost goes against the whole concept of what the Borland RAD IDE
line has offered the developer. Even without the database/web
components, the earlier Personal Editions were easier to use by
mISV/independent software developers than the Explorer editions
because they always avoided databases such as InterBase and MSDE due
to either large runtime/component distribution + throttles (MSDE) or
expensive licensing fees.

With databases like FireBird/MySQL/PostgreSQL and the "cheap" third-
party component suites available for working with them, it wasn't a
biggie that Borland didn't give database components with the IDE.

But of course they have gone a step further with the explorer
editions and made it impossible to install any design-time components
in the IDE. You make it sound like everything a developer needs is
in the IDE and its comp- onent library, which is misleading. It is
not "too good" as you say it is, how- ever, I will not doubt the
greatness that it already is in its current incarnation.

There is still work to do, and we can definitely look at fine tuning
the feature set and what is limited and what is not. Unless we offered
effectively the Professional for free, it will be hard if not
impossible to satisfy everyone.


The inability to install 3rd party components into an explorer
edition is a show- stopper even for most serious open source
developers. I'm working on a fairly complex OS project and I
couldn't use Turbo because I need to use 3rd party components (open
source, and quite a few of them) and cannot expect other open source
developers to buy Turbo Professional at that price to work on free
software on their spare time. It's a showstopper. Had to do with
Visual Studio.

Also to consider is support for SCCI source control systems that was
dropped some time between D2005 and BDS2006. What's up with that?

Schools stopped using Borland C++ (don't know any that use Delphi)
when they shifted to the Ebony/Ivory IDE. I think CBX would have
been nice, but all the schools in this area (LSU, ULL, McNeese, etc.)
have a deal with MS and give away VS Professional Editions to their
students for free. MS gave lord knows how many copies of VS2005
Standard Edition away, which has a feature set almost as extensive as
BDS Pro.

VS Express allows you to install 3rd party components into the IDE.

Ideally, DTG would negotiate deals with the schools to increase the
Delphi exposure. It's one of the areas having an Explorer and academic
priced Professional should help with.

[Snip]
What exactly do you think a 1-Man Shop or mISV is? Considering what
I've read from Borland/DTG in this newsgroup, I wouldn't have thought
I'd hav to tell you what a mISV or 1-man shop needed from a
development tool. It is to my best knowledge that Borland grew up as
a tool vendor that catered themselves to mISVs and 1-man shops,
before they decided to go along with this abortion which is ALM...
That entire paragraph seems shallow...

Sorry if it came across that way. The 1-man shop/mISV has evolved
considerably in the past twenty years. I wouldn't expect a 1-man shop
would have a fully automated build and integrated test system. I would
expect some form of unit testing and acceptance testing, though wonder
how many small shops do that in detail.

I expect a 1-man shop to try and develop simple applications that
relied less on external licenses to keep costs down. It's true that
there are now dozens of open source components that a 1-man shop can
take advantage of, and a lot of applications require some form of
database access.

That's still probably a shallow answer, but a single developer shop can
be a lot of things.

My main point was that the Explorer provides full source which a single
developer or mISV can take full advantage of, which seems to be a huge
advantage to me. They can still check out dozens of projects or source
from code central or other repositories and build their applications
with it, or create components at run time. Not as easily as just
installing components directly, very true, however we've seen a HUGE (
100 000) number of Explorer downloads so there seem to be a lot of
folks taking advantage of what Explorer provides.

On a side note, I put "too good" in parenthesis because there are many
things to improve on - topics discussed in other areas of these forums.

--
Chris Pattinson
QA Manager, DTG, Developer Studio
.

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