Re: Announcing CodeGear RAD Studio 2007


"I.P. Nichols" <NoSpan@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46e67d8f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Rather than just the crass influence of PHBs, bean counters, MBAs and
politics, perhaps UNCs Medical Service decision to go with VB.NET was also
somewhat influenced by Microsoft's outreach to the healthcare developer
community with efforts like this.
http://www.mscui.net/
The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) provides Design Guidance
and controls which allow a new generation of safer, more usable and
compelling health applications to be quickly and easily created. This site
is aimed at user interface designers, application developers and patient
safety experts who want to find out more about the benefits of a
standardized approach to user interface design.


No, I've talked to Fritz several times over the past week or so. His
decision was motivated almost entirely by the CG decision to drop WinForms
and what he perceived as difficulties using Crystal Reports. They
originally started looking at Delphi after many months of frustration trying
to move their VB6 applications to VB.Net. They had two basic requirements
to continue down this path -- the ability to continue using Crystal Reports
as they always have so they wouldn't have to redesign literally hundreds of
reports and that they be able to continue to leverage their investment in
third-party .Net components. As I said, I'm still not clear on exactly what
Fritz meant here since from my understanding they were considering win32
Delphi, not Delphi.Net. In any case, their primary reason for dropping
consideration of Delphi was the loss of WinForms support. The lack of
support for Crystal Reports was already giving them some concerns with
Delphi as a primary development tool.

There were also a couple of political considerations. First, Fritz's group
was coming under closer scrutiny by the medical school's main IT group and
there was concern that they might veto use of a tool that many consider
fringe. PeopleSoft is also coming to this campus to replace our old
student, financial and human resource systems. The ERP folks have given
Fritz's superiors the impression that PeopleSoft will replace all internal
applications that deal with students so there is some concern on Fritz's
part that his group may be eliminated or at least marginalized. Since my
understanding is that much of his work involves providing educational
applications to students rather than records management to administrators, I
suspect PeopleSoft will not be able to replace much of the functionality his
group provides.

Also, the initiative you reference seems to be directed at applications that
involve patient care and providing actual healthcare services. Fritz's
group isn't involved in that side of the medical school at all. His
applications are administrative and educational and are aimed entirely at
students and those staff who work with students. In none of or many
discussions has Frtiz even mentioned the initiative you referenced.

My original point was not to imply that CG should support every technology.
I'm sure they have what they consider very valid reasons for dropping
WinForms. That decision doesn't affect my team's use of Delphi at all since
we have absolutely zero .Net code to date. I was only pointing out that
there are some for whom that decision may be a show stopper. Even with that
decision, Fritz anticipates using Delphi for some small, non-critical apps
and utilities. He continues to monitor these forums and I'm sure he'll jump
in if I've misstated the situation here. Personally, I liked having the
option of C# in the IDE but I haven't really used it yet so it's loss won't
impact anything I'm working on. Besides, we get VS 2005 Pro for free on
this campus so I can always switch over if I absolutely have to do something
in C#/.Net. <grin>

Ray


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