I've been programming with Delphi since day 1 of its initial release. My final version was D7 and this is the version I use for quick application development or maintenance of customers who still have Delphi applications. Still think D5 was their best release. However, D7 still gives me heartache with its bugs. I have not bothered upgrading to Delphi 2005 to do .Net for two reasons; firstly reading all the problems that have been put forward in this list; secondly I have been using Visual Studio for the past 3 years. I consider myself as a C# developer now and do not need to be frustrated using a development tool, such as Delphi 2005 that according to this list is slow and buggy, whereas Visual Studio works and is fast and gives me no problems.
I once spoke to Danny Thorpe about the VCLxx.bpl errors, he said it was due to some 3rd party component, I told him that the environment was free of 3rd party components. This was dismissed as unlikely. How could it be unlikely as it was occurring and shown to him. I also spoke to the managing director of a Borland subsidiary about the rising costs of new version updates. His response was that is "how we make money, we just add some new features". These responses made me uncomfortable with the company that was supposedly helping me make an income using their development tool. Maybe the disastrous Kylix was their focus. I have moved to the Microsoft thinking as they dictate our development world, currently we have .Net, sometime in the future they will have dot something else and will have the development tool long before Borland do something about it. Borland, in my opinion are in a continual catch up mode and are delivering a solution that is now not acceptable to developers. We cannot be their testers and at the same time pay big dollars to upgrade to a product that is buggy and causes us to waste our time to achieve nothing. They apparently don't realize that some of us make a living developing applications and can not afford the time stuffing around advising them of the numerous bugs in their new release. We cannot deliver solutions to our customers with the rubbish we have to pay Borland for. Microsoft have made their tools affordable to the developer and at the same time provide exceptional resources to support their tools, provide great database integration etc. Not like Borland who hit us with big upgrade price for something that doesn't deliver, a crappy Help and very useless resources. I read stuff on this list how Delphi is so great and Microsoft is crap, unfortunately you have to doubt the validity of these arguments, and in all cases laughable, when the respondent has had no exposure to a MS development tool. It is also of interest that I note, a lot a companies that previously used Delphi are moving away from Delphi. You just have to look at job ads, "Delphi and C# experience to convert Delphi to C#". Can any one tell me where Delphi is heading when ads such as this are appearing? Pascal is a great language, the Delphi IDE was good, but some of us have to move on, learn a new language and use a new IDE, and in the case of Visual Studio, is pretty good. I can live with that and am very comfortable with it as it doesn't cause me frustration of coping with bugs as almost every release of Delphi has. I have never had the problems in Visual Studio that Delphi has given me where I have had to use the Task Manager to kill Delphi. Look at some of the components available for C# and it makes life easier to work with a tool that delivers solutions quickly without the added heartburn and frustration. DevExpress is one of those companies. Microsoft invented Windows and are now providing exceptional affordable development tools at the fraction of the cost of a Borland bugged program. Borland's testing must be appalling with what they deliver. Can any one remember a new release of Delphi that worked to expectations without at least 2 updates to fix bugs. The first version of Visual Studio worked bug free. Maybe we are Borland's unpaid testers, but pay for the product to test. I don't know when Borland will get the message that some of us will not tolerate the crap they dish out. I never thought that when I moved from Microsoft's Visual Basic to Delphi and spending about 11 years with Delphi that I would return to Microsoft. Unfortunately it has happened, but fortunately development time with Microsoft has reduced and I don't have to spend hours figuring if it is my bug or a development tool bug. Mike __________________________________________________ Delphi-Talk mailing list -> [email protected] http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi-talk
