blog yesterday

re RIA & Mono, I should probably let the Delphi team address .NET directly and specifically as soon as they are ready, but in a general sense over the last year we've taken a "time out", stepped back and talked to many customers about their future .NET development plans, compatibility, frameworks, platforms, priorities, etc. In the beginning with .NET we put most of our energy into compatibility and replicating the Delphi language and VCL intact in a first class way for CLR, with the goal to make moving to .NET seamless for those applications that would be well suited on .NET - this was balanced against keeping up with the latest frameworks and lavors from MS, latest CLS and CLR feature support etc - which often lost out to compatiblity. Years have passed, and something that has been clear for some time is that most of the migration that was destined to happen, has passed.

Today things like supporting more of the .NET framework flavors (Silverlight, WPF, etc) and keeping up with the latest language and framework releases is of much higher importance. So we have been working on a more aggressive .NET approach that focuses less on being a .NET clone of the native Delphi implementation and more of an open approach that will make more frameworks, platforms, and features available and in a more timely manner. At the same time we have been significantly increasing our efforts and focus on native compiled Delphi and C++, and this adjustment to the strategy should pay off for both native developers and .NET developers. So in a nutshell expect less focus on compatibility between native and .NET and more support for performance and rich UI oriented packaged/desktop/workstation features (ie GUI, DB and CPU) in the native tools, and more support for other .NET frameworks beyond just Winforms and ASP.NET ie WPF, Silverlight, Open source and others - in the .NET tools.

As we finalize plans expect to see a .NET roadmap coming from the Delphi team in the near future.

excellent newsEmbarcadero openness