Considering Delphi

[bgm56]

I'm a novice VB programmer who develops applications for work and looking to develop some to sell. I currently use VB 6.0 but can easily see the end of its support, so it’s not viable in the long term. I own VS 2005 .net but am less than thrilled with it. The ease of decompiling, the slowness of execution are among the reasons.

I am considering moving to Delphi and have some questions.

The application I’m writing has to have the ability to be multi lingual. Does Delphi support resource files similar to VB to allow multi lingual support?

I also write applications that interface into a cad/cam system. I know Delphi does COM programming. Does anyone know how long Microsoft will support COM? Can you build a .net wrapper to interface that way?

What about long term outlook for Delphi? Since Borland has sold it will Embarcadero make a go of it? Will it progress to 64 bit? Or would I be better off to go to C++?

I own Delphi 2.0 & Turbo Delphi Explorer 2006. Is the upgrade to 2010 worthwhile? What advantages would it offer?

Thanks

 

[sggaunt]

Multilingual support: Yes Plenty of work to do but its there.
I would think that COM support will continue, the latest version of the PCB CAD/CAM we use still relies on COM to connect the two parts of the suite.

Long term outlook, well I think this is also a support question i.e. How long will MS support 32bit applications?
In other words I think that applications written with existing version of Delphi (going back at least as far as Delphi 7) will be able to produce runnable code for some time to come.

Delphi 2 Definatly doesn't come into the situation I just mentioned, you do need to upgrade that.

As for upgrading to 2010, that depends on your financial resources more than anything else, but that's just my opinion.




Steve: N.M.N.F.
If something is popular, it must be wrong: Mark Twain

 

[TonHu]

Sorry to say, sggaunt, but if he has some experience with VB, then IMHO the OP should go for VB.NET instead of Delphi (either Win32 or .NET). His past experience with VB and excellent COM integration and multilingual support from the ground up of .NET give enough edge to post this advice.

 

[sggaunt]

Tonhu, To be honest I have to agree with you,
I was just thinking of answers to his individual questions rather than the 'big' picture here, which is, as you say stick with what you know.

He does have a VB.net compiler (Visual Studio 2005) that he's 'less than thrilled with'. But even so?





Steve: N.M.N.F.
If something is popular, it must be wrong: Mark Twain

 

[TonHu]

.NET is the future of MS, and upgrading from VS2005 to VS2008 or VS2010 is, as always, the right option ;-) I'd skip VS2008 (I already have it), even as it's much better than VS2005, but VS2010 is even much more better in total usability.

 

[bgm56]

Thanks for the input. However the app that I'm building is an editor to work on multi meg cnc text files. The test app I built in VB.net 2005 took twice as long to open a 16m file as the app I built in VB6. Save times were longer as well. Combining this with the ease of decompiling the code makes VB.net, to me, not a real viable solution.

I've written a couple of simple apps in Delphi Turbo Explorer 2006 and find it's not too bad. I can upgrade my Delphi 2 to 2010 as long as I do it before the end of the year.

To me the question isn't if I should move to another language, it's which one to move to.

My choices seem to be Delphi, VC++6 or VC++ 2005, with Delphi being the shorter learning curve.

 

[sggaunt]

I think that depends on why you want to move, if its to improve your job prospects, then I would say Visual C++, but I can only speak for my side of the industry (predominantly industrial control, monitoring and logging) in the UK might be different in other countries.

If you just want to maximise your skills as a programmer to prove to yourself, then I would go with Delphi.

However. Looking at your app spec you might want to do low level stuff that's far better suited to C++.
So good luck! (Most of the code I write is embedded C)

[obviously I don't speak for the whole of the UK on any subjects !!!]


Steve: N.M.N.F.
If something is popular, it must be wrong: Mark Twain