The Delphi Survey for 2006
29 Oct
A little late in coming, but here it is:
http://infopoll.net/live/surveys/s30110.htm
In addition, please spread the word to Delphi developers everywhere. We want as much feedback from all around the world as we can get.
I plan on getting it translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, Portugese, and Chinese, so stay tuned if one of those languages is more to your liking.
Added: Translated versions:
Thank you for the survey, but I would have liked to see it tied to BDN accounts and products registrations.
October 29th, 2006 at 3:13 pmOtherwise you have no real way to find out those who "cheats". What hinders someone to tell "yes, I have a large company with thousands developers using BDS 2006 for asp.net projects, that’s what I need" while he’s just a boy playing with TurboExplorer?
I forgot: thank you for working on Sunday to make Delphi better…
October 29th, 2006 at 3:16 pmKent –
If a company has a ton of BDS developers, they should get all their developers to fill out the survey.
In addition, we can — and do — filter survey results along the lines of "What do Turbo Explorer users think?" or "What do Architect users at shops bigger than ten developers think?" so it’s not entirely true that there is "cheating" going on, per se.
Nick
October 29th, 2006 at 3:26 pmThat was an interesting survey. It’s clear that you guys are interested in what we think. Thank you.
While I think we all know what they are, I wish you could post the top requested features. But I guess this is pretty sensitive information for DevCo…
October 29th, 2006 at 4:06 pmThat was disappointing, but not unexpected. I saw a bias there fishing for justification of mobile development.
Here’s a hint: Mobile development is a dying market. Those who need to develop in it already have solutions and those who are interested in starting is an ever shrinking group as full PC class devices have started to enter the market. Quit wasting money and resources, you TOTALLY missed that boat by about 8 to 10 years. By the time DTG finally releases something, the market will have all but dried up. Your budget, resources and manpower are limited, invest it where you still have customers.
As for the documentation section. Yikes. Ok, easy answer, F1 help in the current version is so abysmally bad (even kinda annoying in D7, asking about clx even tho I never use it, and about a 15% misroute rate to clx when it isn’t labelled properly) that it eclipses the fact that the other documents have rottened on the vine since D3.
Yes, I prefer the D1/D2 manuals - they were complete, and exhasitive and had all the things you mentioned. I was hunting for docs about help insight this week when I realized that if I was a new user to the turbo delphi, I would throw my hands up and walk away.
The documentation is so bad, it will actively drive away new people.
It ALL needs improved, drastically and dramatically. You could justify stopping everyone in the company from doing everything but writing documents for 2 months if it would get improved documents out the door at the end of that time.
And on that note, where the heck is Help Insight documented? I can’t freaking find anything. Toss me a rope here.
But, back to my rate, 2 questions on help?? I hope that because you realize that it is really that bad and not because we’re just getting a sugar coated "ya, ya, whatever" here.
Manuals, PHYSICAL MANUALS. Books I can read in the john, in the bath, on the bus, when I am bored, when I am flipping for help. They aren’t that expensive. Turbo Pascal, D1 and D2 build this empire WITH plenty of books. Taking them away just came off as a money gouging move at my expense.
Heck, make them available in print for 20 or 30$ on that print on demand business if you won’t put them in the box. (but first, make sure they are upto date and have everyone read them, and TRY THE EXAMPLES… I remember the websnap examples in D6 -> No hope of them working there they were so wrong)
October 29th, 2006 at 10:57 pmIn fact, coming back to the books, my disaffection with Borland started when they slaughtered the books in D3.
No question, that was when my puppy like devotion to Borland died. It cost over 2 grand and taking the books out of the box to save money CLEARLY felt too much like "you don’t matter, just shut up and pay us".
October 29th, 2006 at 10:59 pmC Johnson -> I agree, I recall I fwlt good about the books. However, especially with Turbos, PDF manuals are also important. IMHO the Borland trend is to pack F1 help in PDF and call that manuals. I would split help and PDF manuals so that F1 is focused on completeness, while PDF is focused on concepts; F1 should be easy to search and PDF a pleasure to read from the beginning to the end.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:49 amCJohnson: "…fishing for justification of mobile development…"
I see "fishing for justification" for plenty of things : Unicode VCL, .NET, CF dev, ECO, and frankly, I’m delighted. Better to look for justification than just head off into Delphi 8 or C++BuilderX territory again.
The survey should give some sensible answers, and - hopefully - Devco will listen to them.
Generally, this survey is streets better than the last one, which just irritated me.
There’s a little bit of "Delphi" bias in a couple of questions. e.g., I upgraded to BDS2006 from C++ Builder 5, but there’s no way for me to say that…
October 30th, 2006 at 2:13 amRe. On-demand printed manuals.
Brilliant idea. Lulu.com is what you’re thinking of.
October 30th, 2006 at 2:15 amPublished it on our site too Nick.
October 30th, 2006 at 5:42 amI was a little disappointed that some of the multiple choice questions avoided the answers I would have liked to give. Specifically, the shift from BDS2006 to D7 was an upgrade for us, but that wasn’t an acceptable answer. So Q1.1, our most recent version is 2006, but we upgraded from there to D7 for Q1.3.
Likewise, for 4.8 it would have been nice to have "used it, like it, but it’s not relevant to what I do now".
The questions alternate between "only answer if you use this" and having an "I don’t use X" option, although 6.3 has both. One style would be better (and there are questions with neither, like 1.3 "moving to the latest version was not an upgrade", or 1.5 "we bought D2006 to get more D7 licenses").
Oh, and when I hit "submit" I got a momentary dialog "you can only enter numbers here", but then the page refreshed and I got the completed page.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:38 pmThe whole recent version/recent purchase paradigm was confusing. I’ve get Turbo Explorer, but I didn’t pay for it. I use D7, but does Turbo explorer count as my recent purchase, or does D7, since D7 was what I actually paid for?
More, since I USE D7, but know of some of the features in Turbo Explorer, some of the feature questions become muddled… No way to answer "Yes, it’s very pretty in turbo explorer, might even be useful if I had it in D7, but since I don’t use turbo explorer, I don’t have it", if you catch my drift. I tried to get as good a balance there as I could.
Basically, if you back ported templates, refactoring and some of the more interesting code completion features, you would EASILY get people to upgrade to an enhanced D7. Since the IDE is all "plugin" in nature, it probably wouldn’t be that hard.
Hey Nick, howsabout bouncing that idea around? I’d probably be willing to pay for a lot of the enhancements in the D7 IDE. I’m still not sold on that new IDE. I continue to find it ugly,crowded and hard to work with. The new tool palette continues to appear as a kludge.
Since the compiler and editor are also plug ins, you could even back port them.
Don’t bother with together or error insight tho. There are 2 features you could drop - the biggest complaint would come from people trying to figure out how to turn them off out of habit before they realized they were gone.
Speaking of features that could go, let’s talk about deprecating websnap next version and dropping it the version after that (unless you wanna just drop it entirely now?)
October 31st, 2006 at 1:08 amthe Portuguese translation it is not OK
October 31st, 2006 at 7:51 amThe survey should have a "general suggestions" section at the end for comments that don’t fit the format of the survey. A lot of the comments are likely to be the same sorts of things you get in blog comments but there could also be some useful feedback that you wouldn’t otherwise get.
October 31st, 2006 at 7:58 amIts nice to see u want to know whats going on on this side, but maybe u should tell us whats going on ur side with DevCo.
At the end of september there was supposed to be news about it, we are now 1 month later and i haven’t seen or heared any news.
What’s going on?
October 31st, 2006 at 9:10 amIn further defense of my position that Mobile development is a dying breed, I point to MS’s recent decission to release the complete source to the newest version of Windows CE.
"The Shared Source program provides access to the Shared Source code available “In the Box”: the Public/Sample Shared Source code and the Private Shared Source code. It is available to everybody using a licensed version of Windows Embedded CE 6.0"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/sharedsrccode/
The conclusion is that MS has decided that the monitary profits are going to be less than the good will engendered by openning this source. A last squeeze of dying field as they transition to full PC class hand hand devices.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:08 amAfter completing russian variant of survey i faced with logon page - Enter user name & password. Huh? What password?
What i have to say - Delphi 2006 is better than 2005 but they both terribly worse than Delphi 7. Documentation is damn slow, incomplete and often miss topics. I run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 on same machine and it fast and stable.
Delphi 2006 lacks two attributes: speed & quality. Regain them back please.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:08 am