Delphi 8 has arrived.
By Toby Allen
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Delphi 8 seems to have finally arrived, or is available for pre ordering anyway. I skipped Delphi7 as Delphi6 did all the stuff I wanted. But now I can upgrade to Delphi 8 and get a copy of Delphi 7 aswell.
Delphi 8 is the .NET release of Delphi. It was a while in coming, but is still the first non Microsoft use of the .NET framework (I might be wrong on that). One thing really bothers me about it though.
Why does it look like Visual Studio?
I've been using Delphi since version 1 and one of the many things that has always set it apart is its IDE. Components (lots of them) on top, and object inspector down the side, and non-visual compnents are placed on the form.
Now with delphi 8 (unless its going to change dramatically from the sneak peak on the borland website) looks and feels like VS.NET. Its a multiple document interface in the style of visual studio with forms being tabs rather than real forms, Non-visual components are placed on a panel below your code and form. One good thing about this is we get collapsable code (which by the way a previous boss of mine said he used to have way back in the late 80's on an IDE he was using).
I'm sure there were plenty of good technical reasons why this had to be done.
These things probably wont prevent me from buying Delphi 8 but it is a real pity. Delphi no longer has the feel of Delphi.