What’s not in the Delphi Roadmap

There are loads of VCL components that work just fine for native and managed code. In many cases, you just recompile your components and applications.

We’ve been telling all developers that we are focused on Delphi and VCL. We held a series of 8 online chats with developers and put the replays up (including the Q&A sections) on our developer network site. I will see about putting up a “what’s not in the roadmap” section.

We have been consistent with VCL support from the beginning. We are continuing to move VCL forward on native and managed code. VCL is the road to 64-bit and other places. Delphi+VCL is the power.

It would appear that Microsoft are moving away from it too.

True, but even Microsoft recommends not to use WPF for line of business apps in .NET 2.0, which is what Highlander targets. Surely it would not have been that hard for Codegear to maintain its existing winform designer in Highlander? But the other issue is about confidence. Someone considering a Delphi .NET project may say, “look what happened to winform support” and have less confidence in the product.

Tim

Delphi developers care about the language and the framework, VCL

Thanks for the comment, David. In the end though, Delphi developers just want to get their work done.

Most people accept, I think, that Codegear has limited resources and needs to focus. Perhaps discarding winforms makes sense. That said, this hasn’t been communicated well. Rather than simply waiting for us to spot that it was missing from the roadmap, it would have been better to be upfront about the decision.

Tim

Yes, all three of them

Agreed, but are there really many more developers using VCL.NET for GUI work? As I mentioned, the main issue is with 3rd party components.

Tim

Delphi developers know what they have with VCL and the thousands of VCL components that are available to be used on Windows and .NET.

I thought the same when I first heard this (as did most other Delphi users from reading the newsgroups) but upon further reading and listening, it became clear(er).

It would appear that Microsoft are moving away from it too. They aren’t dropping it but they’re saying that it will no longer evolve. WPF is certainly being billed as the new WinForms (see here for example).

I admit I think it’s a concern for those who have WinForm applications but once .NET 3.0/3.5 is out, then WPF will be pushed forward and WinForms will be, effectively legacy.

For me I think they might have done well to just leave it alone for those who need to migrate (again) but we don’t appear to have had a definitive answer from CodeGear as to why they have taken such a controversial decision.

anyone who invested in Delphi Windows Forms development has been left stranded

Yes, all three of them… Anyhow, CodeGear’s priorities with respect to Delphi (as set out on the recent-ish roadmap) seem about right to me, given their resources. The shame is that the years between D7 and D2006 cannot be relived…