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The highs and lows of former-Borland's Dumbledore

Stefan Paetow

David I and Anders O... 

Posted Thursday 10th July 2008 10:45 GMT

Two great guys who used to interact a lot with us Delphi geeks on both the borland.* newsgroups and later the Borland community.

They were very much open to discussion, and from what I remember, used to take a lot of what was suggested on board to see if Borland could do better.

A shame that Borland spun out CodeGear, but if Embarcadero is able to leverage that to its advantage, then so much better for all of us. Perhaps there is still some hope.

:-)

Rune Moberg

A lot has changed 

Posted Thursday 10th July 2008 18:42 GMT

Thumb Down

I think DavidI and his band of merry men are on the wrong track. Many Delphi customers have been complaining about the lack of a Win64 version for several years now. CodeGear Delphi now only covers a small part of the Windows platform surface. They need to focus on the things that only they -- the tool vendor -- can do. Nobody else can change the compiler. Nobody else can change the core component library to fit in better with new Windows versions. And where is the unicode support they should've put in ten years ago?

Too much stuff exists only on a dusty roadmap and in competitor's products, rather than installed on my hard drive.

Not everyone is interested in UML and application factories. Some of us still hand code shrinkwrapped Windows software and we need support for the OS. .net support seems like a blind alley, because most of us will simply use Anders' quite adequate C# language for that. OK, some enjoy eco.net, but I suspect those are in a minority (eco.net deserves more attention, I am sure, but big companies with big apps love to waste money on big development teams, and they rarely bother with saving time nor cost).

Free Pascal seems to be heading in the right direction though, so there is hope yet. For an object oriented language that is. Hopefully CodeGear will pick up the slack soon.

The Mighty Spang

microsoft played dirty against netscape? 

Posted Friday 11th July 2008 00:16 GMT

so creating a browser that was faster, used less memory, crashed less and didnt suffer things like all the colours vanishing because you resized the window(*) is playing dirty?

(*) until recently in dreamweaver (hell it might still be there haven't used it for a while) there was an option for adding a peice of javascript that basiclly triggered a reload if you resized the page. all because of that POS netscape.

Jolyon Smith

Goes to credibility... again.... 

Posted Monday 14th July 2008 08:18 GMT

"a reinvented version of its venerable Turbo line called Developer Studio"

BZZZZZT

Wrong. It was in fact the other way around. The Turbo product line was dead. What CodeGear did was re-invent their Developer Studio product as a suite of personalities then released cut down single personality editions as an all new "Turbo".

That was then. Now however, those Turbo's are pretty much Dodo's too, being based on Dev Studio 2006, with 2007 out in the wild for over a year and 2008 just around the corner.

If the rest of the article is more accurate, it doesn't bode well for Delphi's future under Embarcadero.

Software development is the same as it ever was. Sure the buzz words are different but the problems ARE all still the same ones we've always had and always will. The promises from the "high end" tools vendors are also the same as they ever were.

Application Driven Developement, capturing intent, modelling, lifecycle.... didn't BORLAND try to go this route?

CodeGear (and it's new owners) need to wake up FAST to the fact that the development community is not comprised solely of gullible newbies who will believe that "Magic Happens(tm)" will cut their development and maintenance costs and improve software quality and without requiring any intelligence, technical nouse or experience on the part of the business analyst driving the tools.

Borland made their name by cutting through the BS and coming up with tools that got straight to the getting to the cruxof the problem - cutting code.

CodeGear need to do the same.