Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #29
12 Apr
- Jeremy North is always doing something very cool. His latest offering? How to add items to the context menu in Delphi’s Project Manager.
- Our CEO, Jim Douglas, has a blog. (I see that Ben Smith is still blogging as well…..)
- I will be traveling to Chicago and Minneapolis on April 26th and 27th respectively to give presentations in our Delphi 2007 Launch Tour. You can find out more about the whole tour, and sign up for my or any other event here.
- Steve Trefethen’s blog just keeps getting cooler and cooler. He’s constantly working on the blog, and adding all kinds of interesting new features. I mean, check this out. The latest cool thing he’s done is to demo how easy it is to setup Subversion and integrate it with CruiseControl.Net.
- There was a chunk of time when the email server wasn’t working right and a number of folks didn’t receive their Delphi Trial keys via email. John Kaster has a solution.
The reference to Jeremy North’s article brings up an interesting question for me:
What is the different between an IDE package and just a normal package? I know that IDE packages load before normal packages, but is that the only difference?
April 12th, 2007 at 2:00 pmAny chance someone could post some information on the Delphi road map? All of the old links appear to be down/broken. I’m specifically trying to gather what the plan is regarding Win64 and x-platform development. I’m praying it won’t be the same default answer that no one wants those features.
April 12th, 2007 at 10:27 pmMarshall, I gather they can’t publish a roadmap at the moment (SOX-related?)
I was at the ADUG meeting (in Australia) a couple of weeks ago, and the talked about the results of the user survey. Obviously for the same reasons they aren’t publishing a roadmap, they didn’t say what the roadmap was, but they did say that native Win32 was given as a strong priority by the people who answered the survey. (I typed ’string priority’; reminds me that unicode is the other one people talk about a lot.)
To be honest, I have my doubts about how many people would really immediately use those features if they were released, or would convert to Delphi because of them. They’re like electric cars; lots of people say they want to buy an electric car, but few actually do, even though you can get some pretty awesome ones now. That’s just a gut feeling I have, people make a lot of noise on the net
Personally, I would like Win64 and would /love/ Delphi for OSX
If they’re planning anything like that, I very much doubt we would hear about it until it was released, and IMO they’d have to resurrect Kylix at the same time to preserve any credibility.
(By the way Nick, if this is grossly inaccurate please correct me; I don’t want to spread disinformation.)
April 13th, 2007 at 12:06 amI think CG are actually moving in the right direction with Delphi and new tools like PHP. They are never
going to match M$’s release dates for new versions of Dot Net simply becuase M$ controls the platform
(OK technically its an open standard..). PHP, Linux etc are the way to go, not least because it is the one
area they can pretty much guarantee M$ won’t compete in directly.
As for 64 bit computing. It would seem that for the immediate future its only really the server market and
April 13th, 2007 at 4:22 pmhigh-performance-computing markets that are going to embrace it. I can’t honestly see a lack of 64bit
support being that bigger deal for the desktop and corporate workstation markets any time soon.
"PHP, Linux etc are the way to go"
April 14th, 2007 at 5:38 amWe’ve see the way Kylix went. Maybe MS doesn’t challenge that market, but OS does. And it’s difficult to compete in a market where most tools are free, and with a very diferent developers mindset. See the damage Eclipse made to JBuilder.
"As for 64 bit computing … really the server market and
high-performance-computing markets that are going to embrace it"
Do you believe no one using Delphi and C++ Builder targets those markets? Should theyr choice be VS only? Should Delphi just cover the needs of those writing database frontends/small desktop apps? That’s what I call a "rearguard battle". If CodeGear wants to be the Ashton-Tate of the XXI century…
> "Do you believe no one using Delphi and C++ Builder targets those markets?"
If he does, he’s utterly, utterly wrong. We write scientific visualisation and analysis software, sold around the world. It’s written in C++ Builder. (So, 64-bit support and other compiler improvements would be great, even just for memory access.)
Sometimes I think the worst thing about Delphi is that many people regard it as a casual, hobbyist, small-shop-programmer’s tool. I would like to see this perception countered by Codegear. Maybe case studies of large apps, maybe advertising in MSDN magazine (!), and advertising in websites and other magazines frequented by normal Windows programmers who, because they’re normal Windows programmers, are probably using VS. Ie, make yourself into competition!
April 16th, 2007 at 4:43 pmNo Net.2.x ,no future
April 16th, 2007 at 11:26 pmIt’s a shame that there’s no sharing of future efforts for whatever reason. I don’t know about the rest of you, but D7 is getting pretty old. The last test drive of D2007 I downloaded I crashed in 5 minutes flat. I really could care less about .NET because it’s not portable at all. I agree that unicode, 64-bit and cross platform development are crucial areas to be added to Delphi. If CG is so into .NET, why don’t they embrace Mono and actively support that platform? That would provide us with at least all of the above options.
I’ve used Borland’s products since 1984 but I’m starting to question where I should be spending my resources. I need to upgrade my developers to a new environment but am getting increased pressure to provide OS X and Linux versions of the software. I really don’t know if CG’s target for x-platform is existing Linux developers because of the mind set from that group; however, as a long-time Borland customer, I would buy a x-platform toolset that let me move my code onto other platforms. In fact, I bought Kylix 3 and still use it when needed for Linux work. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a new version (or even support) of that product in years.
If CodeGear would embrace a more open development model for their tools (not free, just open), I could at least fix the IDE bugs that prevent me from being productive. As it stands now, I have very large projects that kill the IDE. I spend most of my time using the command line compiler and very little time using the IDE.
April 19th, 2007 at 1:34 pmC Johnson, the IDE packages are built-in and normal packages are normal packages
April 26th, 2007 at 2:00 pm