Going for ECO

Delphi's ECO is a great benefit in the .net world compared to Visual Studio. As far as I know there is no such thing in Visual Studio (yet) that matches the brilliance of ECO.

Until now ECO was only available in the Architect SKU of Delphi. According to the feature matrix of Borland Developer Studio 2006 ECO will be in all SKU's available.
The only difference (according the feature matrix) between the Professional and higher SKU's are that the higher SKU's have autoform support for ASP.NET and State Machines.

As a professional SKU user that is great news. Besides the above mentioned differences it seems that the professional SKU only supports basic object-relational mapping and transparent local XML persistence.
That said you can conclude that for ECO with database persistence support a higher SKU is needed.

Anyway I will definitly upgrade my Delphi version to either professional or enterprise SKU!
Still some time to decide....

Another 24 hours...

This sounds like a new movie, but according to Ander's blogpost it is another 24 hours BDNRadio event about BDS 2006 (Delphi, C#, C++ Builder, ECO, VCL etc.) This will happen on the 24 th october 2005.

This will be fun! (again...)

Borland announces Delphi 2006

In a press release Borland has announced Delphi 2006.

Delphi 2006 the Ultimate Force-Multiplier

Wow, that must have something to do with super man!

According the press release Delphi 2006 will be available for pre-ordering between oct. 17 and 1 december.

Delphi, what is it for me?

There is a sort of discussion going on, about what Delphi really is. Nick Hodges blogpost Dignity is deadly, trickered Allen Bauer in his blogpost Passionate Producers = Passionate Customers. One opinion is that Borland drifted away from the barbarian attitude of the early days, and that it needs more guerilla marketing like the 24 hours of Delphi event.
Well Delphi certainly is not only an IDE, it is community a great technology and it is Passion!
Marco Cantu, also added two intresting blogpost, Delphi Passion and Delphi in Trenches (this post really hits the nail on the head, a great post)

Read the blogposts for the full story.

What is Delphi for me, and why do I love it?

For me Delphi is passion, it always helped me to deliver my software projects in good quality and in time.

With the new roadmap it is very clear that Borland is committed to Delphi. Listening to the roadmap BDNRadio show, you can only conclude that all the people involved in the developing of Delphi are passionated and extremely dedicated.
That and the growing list of bugfixes makes me feel very confident that the next versions of Delphi(DeXter, Highlander, Vista,...) will be competing for the title "best Delphi version ever". Go figure it out: VCL Win32, VCL Win64, VCL for .NET, VCL for CF, VCL for Avalon! ECO, .NET1.0, .NET2.0! Man this will be a beast.

Conclusion: Go Delphi!