Re: How can you drop Winforms support?

"Brian Moelk" wrote

were, I would have suspected Chrome to face great difficulty
with WPF since it is their most recently born designer.

I'll let marc address whether that integration was a cake walk.

However, I suspect that it is *possible* for them to make a
mistake of this magnitude. After all, you claim later in this post
that "MS makes as many mistakes as anyone else. Arguably
more."

There's a significant difference between mistaking the target (which MS does
quite often) and missing what you aim at by this extent.

So given:
1) All designers but the CF designer work for non-MS .NET languages
2) MS makes mistakes

Is it a far stretch to believe that [...]

MS would like to fence off CF as it's own domain? No--I think that a quite
reasonable conclusion.

I don't exactly see CodeGear opening the kimono
for FPC/Lazarus or Chrome.

No law compells charity in either case, and as capitalist actions I can see
the similarity. Nevertheless, the western ethical tradition tends to deal
more harsely with the stingy rich than the stingy poor. <g>

And this can be viewed as smart strategy.

Indeed--that's exactly my point: I never argued that MS was stupid. But the
strategy is not exactly one of language neutrality in any meaningful sense.

have that discussion, but let's not pretend that Borland/CodeGear
aren't willingly choosing to do business on MS' platform.

Of course they are. But let us also not pretend that that choice is
unmotivated. No matter how bad the competition in the open sea is, it
remains that most lakes won't support cruise liner businesses. ON the
desktop, Windows is the only sea there is.

Then why do they bother? Explain the whole VSIP program?

More about letting people sell add-in tools to support MS's languages than
anything pertinent to language neutrality, I think.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700860.aspx

IMO, it's ridiculous to believe that CF application development is the
keystone by which MS is going to dominate .NET language choice.
It's simply preposterous when placed against all of the underlying
and continued work they have taken to enable non-MS languages
on .NET.

Call it a part of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy, then. But MS gave all
indications that it thought CF would be huge: and it really wanted that to
be so to aid in killing off Palm. And they're still pushing the ultra
form-factor
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/umpc/default.mspx

MS desparately wants out of confinement to the PC--and I clearly remember
the launch tour pitches for VS as the royal road to hand-held programming
though CF.

Now on one has made that promise pay off yet--even Crackberries are still
pretty pitiful when you get right down to it. But it's hard to overestimate
the mindshare they had for development three or four years ago--when, for
instance, C++Builder was going to become cross-CPU and Motorola was giving
out development kits to everyone who would take one at BorCon.

That's the environment you have to consider when you ask whether MS
launching the CF designers only for it's own languages was merely an
oversight. It was an 'oversight' that gave them an immense advantage in a
market most thought was going to explode. I remember predictions that there
would be more people programming for handhelds than for 'real' PCs.

And besides the expectation there is also the reality--more than one
Delphite has said goodbye on this forum due to the lack of CF designer
support in Delphi. 'Ridiculous'? Not at all--

We'll see if they change the CF designers in the future. That's the
real litmus test.

Indeed. I wouldn't hold my breath. The most likely scenario would be too
many people starting to develop for SFF devices and not using VS at all.

bobD


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