Kristofer Skaug writes:
Quote
Just to show Borland that Win32 is not a rapidly depleting pond with no
market value:
Would you buy a standalone *Win32*-based Delphi 8, if it had a sufficiently
attractive set of new features over Delphi 7 (.net support excluded, of course)?
Assuming the prices/SKU's and included 3rd party tools (Bold, MM etc) were
the same as for D7.
Yes. I am still hoping it will be released. I definitely see another
few years of life in Win32. I must say that it would be a _VERY_ hard
decision for me to decide between buying a new Win32 Delphi IDE or a new
.NET Delphi IDE. However, I'd probably go with the new Win32 IDE
right now. .NET just won't be useful to me at this point in time. I
currently develop ASP.NET apps in C# and for Win32 applications I use
Delphi. I never intend to write ASP.NET apps in Delphi (unless the
Delphi compiler becomes free like the C# one is) and I certainly don't
intend to write end-user apps in C# at this stage. The big difference
is the deployment of the .NET runtime- I simply can not expect customers
to have it and don't want to require them to download it before using my
applications. This is the same reason that I never switched to Java
from Delphi. I see the runtime requirement as a big negative point.
I am still hoping that Borland will bundle the new .NET and the new
Win32 IDE together in one product. This will allow me to at least
prepare for the situation where .NET reaches critical mass and I can
safely assume that all (or at least a 95%) of my potential customers
have the .NET runtime installed. So I still see .NET as something which
is at least 3 years away for me. Delphi 7 in its current form probably
won't hold out during that time period.
Cheers,
Kevin.