Daily Archives: November 28, 2008

.net, delphi, embarcadero, software development, visual studio

Embarcadero RAD Studio 2009 is done

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Embarcadero / CodeGear has released RAD Studio 2009, which includes Delphi 2009, C++ Builder 2009 and Delphi Prism. Note that Prism has its own IDE, which is actually the Visual Studio shell; this is the new take on Delphi for .NET that targets Mono as well as Microsoft .NET. You can also install Prism into an existing Visual Studio installation.

Looking at the UK prices, RAD Studio starts at £979.00, whereas Delphi starts at £549.00. Upgrades are much cheaper – less than half the price in some cases. The message seems to be: get RAD Studio if you think you might need more than one of these three products.

I’ve been asked whether the upgrade to Delphi 2009 is worth it. I have no idea, of course, since it depends what you need it for – though if you need Unicode I’d have thought it was worth it for that alone. I do think it is the best so far in the post-Delphi 7 series. Personally I prefer it to Delphi 7 as well; though check Mason Wheeler’s comments to a previous post for a contrary view. Vista compatibility is another advantage, though you can hack this in any version of Delphi. I doubt that Windows 7 will be much problem here; it is close to enough to Vista that the same stuff should work fine.

.net, google, internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

From the archives: Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie on ASP+

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My editor at The Register asked me if I had any interviews that would be fun to dig out for a retrospective piece. This one is from September 2000, shortly after the announcement of the .NET Framework, where Microsoft’s Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie talk to me about ASP+, the name for ASP.NET when it was in preview.

Listening to the whole interview was a little frustrating, because most of the time I asked questions that were interesting at the time, like the relationship between ASP.NET and COM, but not so much now. I was reminded though that Guthrie gave an impressive demo of what we now call AJAX, where updates to a web page are processed on the client, and described to me how it worked.

The pair also enthused about hosting Windows Forms controls in the browser, one of the .NET ideas that did not really become practical until the release of Silverlight. The full WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) also works well in the browser, but most web developers rule it out because it is Windows only.

As it turned out, AJAX might never have taken off without the work of Google, while Silverlight now looks like a reaction to Flash. I suspect that Microsoft found it difficult to evolve these ideas into full products because it clung to the idea of a Windows-centric Internet, where Windows rather than the browser is the rich client.

Guthrie is now Corporate VP, .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, while Anders is at Adobe where he has been working on a tool for the Flash platform called Catalyst, previously known as Thermo.