Re: How can you drop Winforms support?

Bob Dawson 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.

Sure.

have that discussion,

It seems that we should have this discussion. (to refresh your memory
"this" = ".NET is more closed than Windows") Do you honestly believe
that .NET is more hostile to different languages than the Windows API?

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.

But that sea is quite large and they've been very successful sailing on
the Windows sea. They don't have to follow into the .NET ocean sailing
the same way MS has done with VS.NET.

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

Sure, because there are more add-in tools than languages. Looking at
the CodeGear side, I don't see anything close to allowing a vendor to
resell the IDE as VSIP does.

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.

That's more appropriate, but I believe you're giving MS a bit too much
credit here. I have no idea what the 999 other cuts are...well, maybe
985. :)

MS competes in many areas, but I hardly doubt there's some coordinated
effort to kill CodeGear or competition off in the DevTools space.

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.

Certainly, and it is pretty big. But we have to remember that there's
*nothing* stopping Borland/CodeGear from two things: 1) build their own
designers for CF or 2) build an ARM compiler and use Win32 widgets.

So if the plan is to leverage MS' "infrastructure" and it turns sour
because it's more targeted to support their products...I really can't
have any sympathy. Why should MS help their competition? Instead of
riding off MS back, why not create something better?

This is exactly what Borland did with VCL as opposed to VB and MFC.
Again, if you honestly believe that .NET is *more* hostile than Win32
is, let's have that discussion. Because all indications from Borland
and others were that it's much easier. That .NET was more like Delphi
and they didn't have to do as much work translating headers, leveraging
the FCL, etc.

In regards to CF support there seems to have been more work done by JED
and the community than anyone at Borland/Codegear. So either CF is
important enough for CodeGear to address the market with a solution, or
it's not.

Now on one has made that promise pay off yet--even Crackberries are still
pretty pitiful when you get right down to it.

There's a big space for Symbian based phones as well.

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.

Sounds a bit conspiracy theory to me. The bottom line is that CodeGear
is free to build their own CF designer if they choose to do so.

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--

Promising one and then not delivering doesn't help either. Let's blame
MS for that too shall we?

--
Brian Moelk
Brain Endeavor LLC
bmoelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

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