Having come from a background of using Delphi since v1, I have mixed
feelings about which IDE is the best to use.

Certainly, D2005 is a superb product, but it has yet to mature in stability,
but then I have heard of many people who have VS cause problem in that area
as well.

Delphi provides a mixed development environment, where you can do Delphi for
Win32, Delphi for .NET and C#, all in the one IDE, and in the same project
group (solution).

D2005 is especailly good if you are wanting to leverage legacy Delphi code,
as much of your exisiting code will simply recompile into Delphi for .NET.

I like the Delphi IDE better, because it has always had more productivity
features and the editor behaves in a familiar way.

However, my latest work is converting several OO frameworks to the .NET
environment.

At the moment, Delphi does not support the Compact Framework, due to the
fact that Microsoft failed to separate out the CF APIs and designers for
third party use; neither does it yet support .NET 2.0, but that is not
surprising seeing as that particular animal is still in beta.

So, I am using VS2005 to work on my frameworks, because of the new features
like generics which have saved me so much extra coding.

I did start on conversion to C# using VS2003, but found that the extra code
involved in writing typesafe lists and iterators by not having a generic
mechanism was an awesome barrier. Delphi already supports generic coding and
has so done since the Turbo Pascal days (you can use include files and type
substitution) and I gather that there are plans afoot, as soon as generics
are firmed up under .NET 2.0, to have them available in Delphi, even to the
point of porting 'true' generics back to the Win32 version.

I gather add-ins are a lot easier to do than in previous versions of VS, but
then .NET allows you to create tools in the same language that you would use
to develop, unlike the old VB days where you had to use OCXs etc written in
C!! But I do find the requirements for creating add-ins quite daunting in VS
and only just a little easier in Delphi :-)

I use ModelMaker Code Explorer www.modelmakertools.com/codeexplorer in
Delphi and this has been enabled in VS2003 and is almost ready for VS2005.
It supports both Delphi and C#, so I get the same functionality no matter
which IDE I am working in.

Interestingly enough Microsoft use Borland tools as part of their project
management offerings.

As a member of Borland's TeamB (equivalent to Microsoft's MVP) I may be
biased towards Delphi, but OTOH, I have felt quite at home in the VS2005 IDE
(now that I've remapped the shortcuts to Delphi equivalents :-)))

Joanna

--
Joanna Carter (TeamB)
Consultant Software Engineer

VG.net runs only in Visual Studio. See link below.

Regards,
Frank Hileman

check out VG.net: http://www.vgdotnet.com
Animated vector graphics system
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