[DUG] Rad Studio Criticism

[Eric A]

Jeremy,

Some thoughts as to why CodeGear aren't actively embracing .NET CF ...

1) I used Visual Studio and the Compact
Framework (versions 1 and 2 with all their service pack incarnations!)
extensively last year and I'd have to say that the .NET Compact
Framework is not a great development environment to work under. 
Deployment of the CF applications is not straightforward, in fact
its a right pain if you want to generate a "click once" install CD,
unless you invest a considerable amount of time to set it up properly
yourself.



2) To produce the Compact Framework the full .NET Framework had to be
"crippled" to reduce its size to fit mobile devices.  The result is that to do some simple
things under Windows Mobile 2003 with .NET CF (eg. playing sound) one had to do a
"PInvoke" of unmanaged code to call a C++ dll.  (you might as well have
just used embedded C++!!).

3)
The framework is still in state of rapid change (find
the Microsoft document that talks about "% churn" in various classes of
the framework - some up to 60%!).  Sure there are improvements but its
a real effort to keep up with changes.

4) If you're working with
Bluetooth then MS only support their own Bluetooth stack (another MS
reinvent the wheel...).  Sure you can download the source for accessing
the Broadcom stack but its in C++ so you've got to recompile (and
adjust the source) to compile under Visual Studio and then write a
wrapper to get a .NET accessible stack.

5) Support for the
Compact Framework, unless you splash out and pay the $$ for the MSDN
subscription, is really only via the MS CF forum.  Responses are slow
at best - I've waited for over a week in some cases, only to find that
it was an "undocumented feature" in the framework and that there's a
new service pack being released to fix it in three months time.  Not a
pleasant outcome when you're trying to deliver applications on time to
a Client ...


I haven't had a chance to investigate the J2ME
environment in detail but I am aware that quite a number of developers
in NZ are using it.  There's a lot of functionality in J2ME (quite a
number of features omitted from the CF are actually provided in J2ME)
and it appears at first sight to be easier to use.  You do, however,
need to ensure that you have an appropriate Java Virtual Machine for
the target device.

Interestingly there's still a large
contingent of developers in NZ who are NOT rapidly moving away from the
"unmanaged" embedded C++ environment to the .NET CF environment.  As I
understand it the issue is that they're going to have to write even more
code in CF to do things that are currently part of the Microsoft
Frustration Class (MFC) plus the issue of keeping up with changes and
peculiarities in the framework.

On
the basis of the above I can
well understand the reluctance of CodeGear to embark down that
development track, plus I think that CodeGear already has more
development
environments to support than they need...  To be frank, despite its
notable enhancements,  Delphi 2007 still has some way to go before it
attains the stability of Delphi 7!!!

Eric
From: vss at vss.co.nz
To: delphi at delphi.org.nz
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 08:20:03 +1300
Subject: [DUG] Rad Studio Criticism








HI 
All.
Well I installed Rad 
Studio the other day, and was disheartened to find that there is still NO 
Compact Frame Work integration !
CodeGear must SURELY 
be aware of the work done by Jeremy North and that with some small changes, or 
at the very least integration of Jeremys work (if he agreed of course) into Rad 
Studio, especially since we can now use .Net 2.
How LONG have people 
been asking for this? It seems strange to me that CodeGear either 1. dont 
listen, or 2. just dont see it as important, to add CF Work 
support.
 
Jeremy

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