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Brion L. Webster
Delphi Developer |
Morning General Session notes2003-11-04 12:50:58 AM off-topic6 Well, the morning General Session (just finished) was interesting. The audience mood was pretty somber. You could tell the Borland folks thought there would be clapping in spots, and none of us obliged. We did clap for quite a few things, just not everywhere they seemed to expect it. Blake came out and addressed the Delphi issue. Lots of you last night asked about a Delphi update, and we danced around the issue. Well, that's because we have exciting news for you this morning! Yes, news about the Delphi update! At this point, the crowd was actually getting interested - A Delphi 7 patch/update announcement? No - Delphi 8 for the .NET Framework. Lots of talk about why it's cool, how .NET is the future, MS is making it the API instead of Win32, etc. Very little audience interest. My feeling is that Delphi developers aren't that e{*word*277}d about .NET. Yes, we need to be able to get there, but given our druthers, the vast majority of us here at BorCon seem to want to stay primarily in Win32, and just "toe in the water" in .NET. Obviously Borland's analysts feel the larger market is somewhat different, but heck, we're the folks who are paying $2,000 to get here. There were some very cool things - the Delphi 1 Fish Facts demo, file date 02/15/1995, opened in Delphi for .Net, compiled, and ran as a fully managed .NET application. They built a library in .NET that exported a function. Then they turned around in Delphi 7, declared the external function in myNetLibrary.dll, and consumed it perfectly. Apparently this is a unique feature to Delphi for .NET - you can write .NET assemblies, then have any Win32 development environment staticly or dynamically link to the .NET dll. Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>. -Brion |