Daily Archives: July 13, 2007

software development, windows

CodeGear abandons .NET Windows Forms?

10 Comments

Intriguing blog post here suggests that future versions of Delphi .NET will not support Windows Forms, the most widely used GUI library for .NET. Apparently the Delphi 2006 Windows Forms designer will not appear in Delphi “Highlander”. If you want to do GUI work in Delphi .NET, you will have to use VCL.NET, or else make do without a designer.

At first glance this looks like a mistake. The main problem is third party components. There are plenty around for Windows Forms, few for VCL.NET. OK, you can import a Windows Forms component and use it in VCL.NET, but it’s not ideal.

Then again, what is the future for Delphi .NET? Pretty uncertain, judging by what CEO Jim Douglas told me. If the speculation about Windows Forms in Delphi is correct, then anyone who invested in Delphi Windows Forms development has been left stranded. Might not the same happen to VCL.NET developers? And what are the implication for WPF, a much nicer GUI library than Windows Forms though immature and little-used at the moment? Developers hate this kind of uncertainty.

internet, microsoft, search

How to buy market share in search … or not

1 Comment

Microsoft gained remarkable market share in search last month, up from 8.4% to 13.2%. At last, competition for Google and Yahoo. Or is it? It turns out that most (not quite all) of the search gain was thanks to the Live Search Club, an online word game which links to Live Search. Remove its 3 million hits, and the gain is just 0.3%.

It gets worse. The Live Search Club lets you win points by completing games, and then exchange your points for prizes such as a Zune or Windows Vista. Very nice. But some dastardly individuals devised bots that complete the games for you. Result: product to sell on eBay. A low trick.

Personally I’m not chuffed with Live Search Club. I completed a game of Chicktionary without using a bot, won 20 points, but when I tried to register the site had gone offline. Drat. Still, perhaps Microsoft is coming up with some anti-bot measures.

It strikes me that Microsoft is being a little naive here. On the other hand, here I am writing about Live Search. So as a PR effort, I guess its working.

microsoft, software development, windows

Performance expert becomes Visual Studio Chief Architect

Microsoft’s performance specialist Rico Mariani is to be Chief Architect of Visual Studio.

Mariani has earned huge respect for his detailed blog posts on performance issues in .NET. He’s recently posted some fascinating figures on Linq to SQL performance. From a technical point of view, it looks like Visual Studio architecture is in good hands.

Perhaps this also indicates that Microsoft is giving higher priority to performance. That’s needed. Most of my gripes about Windows Vista are performance related. Take the new Event Viewer, for example, just because I used it this morning. It takes 20 seconds to open on my system, during which time it displays “reading log” messages. This never happened with the old event viewer, which opens without any delay. The new one is much prettier, but at what cost? These small delays, repeated n times a day, consume a huge amount of expensive admin time.

That said, it’s puzzling to find a performance guy in charge of architecture. Still, Visual Studio is the first link in a chain that leads eventually to Windows, Office, and most third-party Windows apps. More speed everywhere, please.