A few pithy observations: -Short summary - no point complaining!! (as Eckhart Tolle said "suffering only starts if you cannot accept what is real")
-I have the impressions MS only started supplying free windows updates around the time of XP SP2 once they started getting such bad press about the security holes in Windows, around 2003/2004. If they had not they would have had taken very very bad press and general reputation from the security problems in XP. This effort also had much to do with derailing the then development of what ended up as Vista as they moved a lot of staff to fixes. Most technical commentators say they did a pretty good job of redoing their coding standards - which lincluded a whole list of standard C routines that could not be used anywhere in code because of the potential abuses of them - (stcat was I recall among them - which is geting pretty severe!). It was still however an exercise in patching a system designed as open as possible for program interoperation and is only partially successful compared to say industrial Unix -The only knowledge I have of D2005 was a friend was happy using it for work doing heavy graphics. He updated to D2006/D2007 later and compared using all of them quite favourably. My inital experience with BDS2006 was there were increasing memory usage over time that did get fixed steadily with hotfixes and D2007 was better again. ( Firefox 2 was worse, also cleaned up a lot in Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.6/3.7 - coming) -Yes upgrading Delphi costs money. Remember its the only way that E gets money from developers, and a professional version is reasonable price - the D2007 Professional edition contains much of and more than the Enterprise edition had in D5 (eg Client datasets, Intraweb, XP/Vista themes and Rave reports). If you are wanting to earn good money from your tools you expect to pay for good ones. Look at it as betting money that Delphi has a future. If you are a Jade developer you used to and probably still pay a percentage of all sales to Jade on deployment (used to be 25%) - would you rather such a scheme? -$500, $1000, $1500 for complete IDE, really how many hours work needed to pay it off? less than paying off your PC I bet. If you buy a lemon PC you triy to get it fixed, but after a while if its a waste of time you generally go get a newer one and pay again. -If you want free tools get Eclipse/Lazarus. Delphi is better. Or get the Turbo Delphi version. There is a lot to be said for using only the standard VCL to do everything anyway (I use almost nothing else and am pleased about that - but still get the Professional version). -If people are stuck on D7 and want a cheaper upgrade path, I suggest some lobbying to E for a special upgrade period and jump on it. D2007 has been so much better than D7 anyway overall that you have had lots of chances up to now, that you almost took a gamble by not upgrading that you would be able to as cheaply later. Personally I would have not been surprised if I got no upgrade rights from D2007 if the owner had changed and 3 years had passed - I get no cheap upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 and thats only a year old with the same owner who could well have offered a cheap upgrade for PR from an unpopular version of Windows.... John >You are right, and its worth noting how far along MS have moved their "bug >fix" policy since they tried to charge for >cdroms to fix bugs. Many mnay >more years support now.
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