Borland Delphi .NET review

However, even if you were to complete an application, Borland doesn't intend for you to deploy it yet. The Readme states that 'it is not intended for use in production applications'. Although Borland's marketing proclaims that 'Delphi 7 Studio provides the migration path to Microsoft .NET that developers have been waiting for,' this is only a half-truth at best. The real goods will come with Galileo, Delphi 8 or whatever the next version turns out to be called. In the meantime, however, Delphi developers who need to interoperate with .NET now will have to use Web Services or COM InterOp.

Borland's .NET initiative is significant. While Microsoft may lose a few sales of Visual Studio .NET, the platform will gain from the support of this major independent tools vendor. It's also interesting to speculate whether Borland may take an interest in Mono (see p191), thereby opening up another route to cross-platform deployment. The company undoubtedly has the required expertise. The .NET Framework already offers code security, great productivity and excellent support for both web and rich-client applications. If it begins to lose its Microsoft-only flavour, adoption will be greatly boosted.

Author: Tim Anderson