Re: The New Roadmap

Bruce McGee wrote:
What do you want to see?

Something inspiring.

The VCL is more than the visual controls,

Certainly.


ASP.Net is quite cool and may be worth risking some breakage. However,
WinForms is not my first choice for .Net UI apps.

I'm not terribly concerned with breakage. Once something is deployed,
if it ain't broke don't fix it. Having said that, good forward
compatibility is essential and historically MS haven't been as good as
Borland has been.

We're in agreement here. I hope CodeGear will become even more source
code friendly going forward.

Borland (and now CodeGear) have shared almost the entire source code
for the VCL since Delphi 1. There are only a few pieces that haven't
been shared and even this is improving.

Yes, the steady improvement is what I was commenting about.

It's Microsoft that needs to
play some serious catch up here. I'd call that significant.

My comments had nothing to do with MS's willingness to share their
source. I agree that MS has further to go in this regard than
Borland/CodeGear.

Or, since development is continuing in both Win32 and .Net, use the
VCL in both places where it makes sense.
IF development is continuing in both places

Do you doubt it? The VCL has been steadily improved since it was
released. Or are you one of those people who claims that the VCL
hasn't been updated since version whatever?

I misunderstood, I was talking about *my* development, not
Borland/CodeGear's.

I don't advocate recompiling whole applications in both environments.
Only the things that make sense, and a lot of these probably won't be
visual.

Agreed.

It's funny, because I'm actually faced with the prospect of having
Delphi code that runs in a GUI application that I can move to an
ASP.NET application. This sounds like a perfect candidate for Delphi
for .NET, but I'm quite skeptical because a lot of the lower level
stuff I leverage in my libraries don't have .NET versions.

What's missing?

Well, the NexusDB layer will need to be rewritten, embedded Indy
HTTPserver command dispatching and I'm using OmniXML in some places so
I'm not sure how I'll replace that. Basically the whole backend
plumbing; which isn't a huge deal, since ASP.NET provides some of this
out of the box.

I don't know all the specific details right now, but I'm not certain my
hosting company will allow assemblies that require full trust to run
which may or may not cause problems with SysUtils dependencies.

WinForms is what it is (not so hot). But VCL and VCL for .NET are two
different things entirely.

They both paint faster than WinForms.

Understood, but I'm not necessarily talking about WinForms here. Let's
assume for a minute that Delphi developers will not choose WinForms.

So the choice facing a Delphi developer is VCL or VCL for .NET. Then I ask:

How are they different?

And the answer is: one is a .NET implementation, the other isn't. To
the end user is there any perceptible difference?

But you're right about the third party support. I'm not sure how that
is going to pan out.

And this is a *huge* thing for me. I use a good deal of third party
components to get the functionality and "look and feel" I want.

Except we don't have WPF. Bummer. Oh that's right, in 6 months time
we can fire up notepad. :)

Granted, but we will be able to use WPF and can use the stand alone
designers from Microsoft and third parties.

That's a big one.

For business type GUI's, why would I choose .NET when I've got VCL
Win32? IMO, there's no need for the plethora of options afforded by
Delphi for .NET to begin with.

We sort of agree.

Good. :) Long live VCL Win32!

Unless I have a really good reason, Delphi Win32 is my first choice for
any project. Likewise, if I need to write a Delphi for .Net GUI app, I
will choose VCL.Net over WinForms unless there is a good reason to do
otherwise.

Why would you ever *need* to write a .NET GUI app?

I always want more options, not fewer.

I don't; I would prefer a single option that works.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/01/040301crbo_books
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2004-01-16-paradox-choice_x.htm

I want the freedom to pick the
best tool for a given job

Agreed. Who's stopping you?

and the security to have a fall back plan.

IMO, there's no real security in choosing Delphi beyond knowing that you
can get things done. But there's no employment security, no product
security, etc...

Not that there is with MS' offerings either, but there is a higher
degree of employment security.

I
like playing in .Net, but it isn't the only game in town, and I want
the option of moving back and forth and/or interop between them in any
way I need to, not just what Microsoft chooses to support.

IMO, MS is supporting .NET a lot better than Borland and CodeGear have done.

And this goes both ways. If CodeGear lets me down (my definition, not
anyone else's), Microsoft is my (decidedly second choice) fall back
plan.

I don't really have a plan, I just know what technologies I'm interested
in working with and what their relative strengths/weaknesses are. IMO,
Delphi's strength is not .NET.

--
Brian Moelk
Brain Endeavor LLC
bmoelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

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