Microsoft have probably just saved Silverlight. Their recent announcement of the Windows Phone 7 Series, and more importantly the development platform for that phone (Silverlight of course) means Silverlight is important now. I was always pretty sure WPF would become the defacto standard for desktop applications (and what with Visual Studio now being written in WPF, perhaps it will), but I couldn’t quite see a compelling reason behind Silverlight. Now there is one!
Have Embarcadero backed the wrong horse (again…)? They’re targeting the MAC with their next compiler. Probably because they think that is where the future is. Perhaps the future is with Seattle and not Cupertino!
They have Delphi Prism of course, and you can develop for Windows Phone using that. Having said that, no one has ever answered my question? Why should I use Delphi Prism and not C#? Now before I get a 1000 comments telling me that Pascal is easier to read than C#, I just want to say I agree. I love Prism! I wish I could use it every day. It’s awesome. Can I praise it anymore? I need a reason to use it though. One I can go to my boss with. I’d like to be able to go to him and say, “you know that project we were about to develop in C# (the one we decided to NOT use Delphi native Win32 for!), well I think we should use Delphi Prism because….”
If anyone can complete that sentence for me, I’d love to be able to use it. I wish Microsoft had approached Remobjects and partnered with them rather than Embarcadero. The only way my boss would agree to Delphi Prism would be if it sat along side C# and VB.NET in the default install of Visual Studio. That wouldn’t guarantee anything, but I’m sure the added exposure would garner quite a few new followers.
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6 comments:
I dunno. Your assertion that Windows Phone 7 makes Silverlight suddenly important is based on the unspoken assumption that Windows Phone 7 is important. Is there anything to indicate that it will be any less of a joke in the marketplace than previous incarnations of Windows Mobile or the Zune?
What's the point?
Go for C# and use a modern standardized pure OO-language, one you can do myString.length instead of length(myString).
The same is true for java.
"Pascal is easier to read" is the statement which is used by people which pascal is the only language they know.
Nice article.
I've been a delphi users since V1, and C# developer since .NET 1.0.
I see the Windows Mobile as DEAD.
Android is killing it, along with the iPhone.
The removal of Windows mobile 6.x compatibilty and restricting to silverlight will only kill it further. Do they seriously think Tom Tom or others will rewrite ? When they can get more market share with Android and iPhone ?
Html5/Javascript is moving forward.
I love the idea of silverlight, but only recently (this week actually). Given up on the tech...
Why ?
No Silverlight for Android, iPhone, Media PC's, Pads, Netbooks etc etc... And Mono is a half finished hack.. (again I love the tech/played with mono etc.. But its way way to buggy still for commercial use).
Also jQuery/Dojo/etc all are doing amazing things with HTML/Javascript.
Similarly..
.NET 3.5SP1 was a DOA..
500Megs to install on a machine with no updates.. They are joking.
Yes 4.0 will be 30-60Megs.
For what ? Yes a nice runtime.
BUT.. Try and roll that out at a school on 1000'pc which are LOCKED with deepfreeze or similar.
Winforms are SLOW.
WPF is even slower unless you have the right video driver.
Memory usage is higher, etc..
I LOVE .NET but i'm actually looking to refocus on DELPHI..
YES.. Going to the tech.. Not away.
Which I never ever throught would happen..
I'm 100% pro C#, just the runtime/deployment/speed is becoming a factor for MY clients.
Delphi needs a few things.
1) Updated libs (regex, threads, collections, strings)
2) Cross Platform (osx, linux, android, iphone)
3) 64bit
Yes its not perfect.. I had given up on Delphi around 2007 myself..
But silverlight (other than olympics) and some partner sites is going nowhere..
I'm all for HTML5/Javascript now.
NO LOCKIN.
Yoy probably won't be able to use prism to develop for Windows Phone for a while. At the moment it is c# only, not even vb.net works.
An idea: what if Embarcadero let other compilers to fit in RAD Studio IDE? Let it be FreePascal.. )))) Maybe it boost usage of RAD Studio itself.
Here at Falafel, from the consulting perspective, we're seeing Silverlight explode all over and clients are requesting it far more frequently than WPF. The fact that MS made it the standard on Windows Mobile will certainly further drive adoption and I think with Microsoft's dev tools they'll have all the pieces in place to seriously bring to bear their developer masses.
The new MS phone platform will be interesting to watch whereas the old was a completely non-starter.
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