Marco Cantu, today had an interesting blogpost, where he quotes Michael Swindell, the brand new head of productmanagement at Embarcadero, on his feedback on another post about Delphi for .NET plans.
A quote from Michael's feedback:
"In the beginning with .NET we put most of our energy into compatibility and replicating the Delphi language and VCL intact in a first class way for CLR, with the goal to make moving to .NET seamless for those applications that would be well suited on .NET"
That is correct, the winforms designer was dropped in Delphi 2007 (leaving existing Delphi .NET winforms apps in .NET 1.1).
The motto in that days was pretty much Delphi is VCL.
He continues:
"Today things like supporting more of the .NET framework flavors (Silverlight, WPF, etc) and keeping up with the latest language and framework releases is of much higher importance. So we have been working on a more aggressive .NET approach that focuses less on being a .NET clone of the native Delphi implementation and more of an open approach that will make more frameworks, platforms, and features available and in a more timely manner. "
The quote "less on being a .NET clone of the native Delphi" makes imo the statement Delphi is VCL false. (At least on the .NET side of the fence)
It even gets better:
"So in a nutshell expect less focus on compatibility between native and .NET and more support for performance and rich UI oriented packaged/desktop/workstation features (ie GUI, DB and CPU) in the native tools, and more support for other .NET frameworks beyond just Winforms and ASP.NET ie WPF, Silverlight, Open source and others - in the .NET tools."
All with all this is great news, isn't it?
One could think that even support for a winforms .NET 2.0 designer could be on the radar. Until the .NET roadmap is published this is, of course, pure speculation.
What do you think?
