Huw Collingbourne on Delphi 2006 and .NET

Today, Ryan McGinty uploaded a link an interesting article on a debate on .NET in the public Borland Delphi news groups. Huw Collingbourne said the following about the new release of the Borland Developer Studio 2006.

I agree with you to a large extent - the editing and debugging environment of Visual Studio is excellent. The debugging tools in particular are much better even than those in my beloved Delphi. However, speaking of Delphi… I wonder if Borland now has a realistic opportunity to offer competition to Microsoft? With the new release of the Borland Developer Studio, you’ll have the option of coding in C++ for Win32, C# for .NET and Delphi for .NET (Win Forms). Moreover, Borland has a powerful class library (VCL) that works pretty well on both Win32 and .NET. That’s why some VB developers are looking to Delphi as a serious alternative. Unlike VB, which commits you either to Win32 (VB6 and its predecessors) or .NET (VB .NET), a Delphi Win32 VCL application can be recompiled for .NET with few (or if you are careful, with no) modifications to the source code. In principle it seems to me that Borland’s .NET solution is essentially better than Microsoft’s.

Now, that let's one hope for great times to come, doesn't it?