Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Go VCL.NET or go Winforms?

I know it is discussed before, but lately there is a lot going on in the VCL.NET world, which can influence your descision.

To name a few:
  1. The discovery of the TADONetconnector, which provides a bridge between a .net datatable and the VCL TDataset.
  2. The increased possibility for a VCL.NET/Compact Framework edition.
  3. Avalon
1. The discovery of the TADONetconnector
This component makes it possible to retreive data from a .net dataset in a VCL TDataSet component. This is a very important issue because a lot of data today is retreived from ASP.NET webservices, which of course returns a .net dataset.
It is obvious that if you have to retreive a dataset from a webservice you would choose winforms over VCL.NET, but knowing this component you could use VCL.NET instead!
For more information please view Dr Bob's article TADONETConnector: using ADO.NET in VCL for .NET

2. VCL.NET/Compact Framework edition
There is a lot cooking in the Compact Framework world. Danny Thorpe discusses the possibility of a VCL.NET/CF edition. This would be really great! Although the functionality of a VCL.NET for CF will not be same as the VCL as we know I think it is a great extension of the VCL family.
For more information please view Danny Thorps blog.

3. Avalon
With Avalon in Microsoft's pipeline, the future of Winforms is not good. This means that sometime in the future it might be that you will have to convert your winform application to Avalon. Will this be easy? Well some say it will, and some say it won't.

On the otherhand VCL has a great history of transitions from different platforms(Win16-> Win 32->CLX->VCL.NET) so there is a great possibility that the VCL will make it into an Avalon version. Will this be easy? Well some say it will, and some say it won't.

In my opinion VCL.NET is a great choice, but that of course is from a Delphi developer point of view.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe this post will help?

Use an image as your UIBarButtonItem

Using an image as your UIBarButtonItem in your navigationcontroller bar can only be achieved by using a common UIButton as the BarButtonItem...