I can’t believe this day has come. Perhaps I always new it would, but it just seemed like a bad dream that wouldn’t ever quite come true.

The other day I got to work to find Delphi 8 sitting on my desk. Being that I’ve been working in Java for the last few days, I haven’t really had a chance to mess around and install it. Boy I’m glad I didn’t. A co-worker just installed it and called me over to look it and my jaw hit the floor. The environment is Visual Studio almost EXACTLY. They’ve taken everything that was unique about Delphi and jettisoned it for Visual Studio. While some of the changes are arguably better, there is now absolutely no reason to use a Borland product over M$. M$ is the established windows development environment, but Borland has made it’s mark by beating them at their own game every step of the way. Until now. Now Borland is a year behind and has offered something that yields absolutely no benefit. Well Ok, perhaps the vastly superior VCL (Which is far better than MFC in my experience), but that’s not saying much in the grand scheme of things when most people are more familiar with MFC. And besides, we’re all moving to .net anyway for Windows development, right?

So, this team is jumping ship as of now. If we do any more windows development (which is itself debatable) we’re going with Microsoft tools. Because why fight the system if the alternative offers no difference?

At least my main project is in Java now so I don’t have to come to terms with loosing my favorite development environment just yet.

Sad to hear...I'm programming in Delphi right now. Have been using it since 2.0. (What happened to the awesome help files from that version? No version since has been as good.) I'm not altogether surprised...I imagine Borland has been bleeding marketshare for a lot of years now.