D2006 vs. VS2005

Last Friday, Delphi 2006 (or should I say Borland Developer Studio 2006) was launched here in Helsinki. I had a session together with Jason Vokes and Henrik Jondell.

Now that both Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Delphi 2006 are out, many developer have started to ask which is a better choice. Well, there are many sides on this coin, but frankly I don't understand these two tools are compared head to head.

In my opinion, if you want to use latest .NET 2.0 technologies, then there's currently only one choice: Visual Studio 2005.

However, if you already have a significant investment in Delphi code, then I don't see why there would be such a rush to Visual Studio, especially if you haven't yet used .NET at all.

Learning to develop .NET applications takes a while, and since the platform is so large, it will take years to master it. Even if you would jump today from Delphi to VS 2005, you wouldn't be productive (in real-world applications) in at least half a year. In that time, Borland probably has at least a beta out of Highlander, their .NET 2.0 compatible tool.

The bottom line: both Delphi 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 are excellent development tools for the Windows platform. One shines in .NET, the other supports both Win32 and .NET. From that perspectives, comparing these two is like comparing apples and oranges.