[DUG] Rad Studio Criticism

[David Brennan]

Interesting comments.

 

I can see the reason for people wanting CF support but I can also see the
reasons CodeGear haven't really jumped on board. 

 

Personally I'm much more interested in seeing Delphi Win32 becoming more
stable and finally getting some new language/compiler features (eg generics)
than I am to see CF support, especially since Codegear are never going to be
able to match Microsoft in CF.NET support (since Microsoft own and are
constantly moving the goalposts in that area).

 

I would also MUCH rather see Codegear spend their time implementing into
Delphi Win32 the ability to access .NET assemblies as directly as possible
(without the current DLL/ActiveX steps). If they can do that then I will be
much happier as our customers or partners develop/buy their own .NET
assemblies for ordering/accounting systems or whatever that we need to
interact with.

 

David.

 

 

 

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From: delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz] On
Behalf Of Eric A
Sent: Monday, 8 October 2007 4:19 p.m.
To: delphi at delphi.org.nz
Subject: [DUG] Rad Studio Criticism

 

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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