No more WinForms support in next CodeGear Delphi .NET

There's a recent blog post in Borland/CodeGear's blog about the next version of Delphi, and what's included and what's not. One thing that alarms me is that CodeGear has made the decision to drop WinForms supports from it's fortcoming Delphi version. An interesting decision to say the least.

Of course, many Delphi fans say that it's a good move to focus on where Delphi is the best, i.e. native Win32 world. However, I believe for ordinary business applications, .NET is the future. The VCL library is in my opinion lacking in many areas that are now common needs in business applications, for example database support (SQL Server's advanced features), XML manipulation (where's my XPath?), cryptography, and general convenience of manipulating files and directories, for example. I'm not saying VCL cannot be used, in fact it can do marvellous things, but it cannot compete with the huge .NET libraries. Yes, it is indeed possible to use all these from VCL.NET applications, but I don't want to use VCL libraries in .NET if I can avoid that.

Why? Because my world has changed. In the Win32 world, I could use Delphi alone, because it was enough for my needs. But when .NET came along, I learned Visual Studio, and now suddenly I need to use both Delphi and Visual Studio. For me, learning one GUI library (read: WinForms) would be the optimal solution. Now I do have to remember two: VCL and WinForms.

For developers using Delphi only, making the growth-path from VCL to VCL.NET easy is a key in moving Delphi developers to the .NET world. However, those who have already started using Visual Studio for (some of) their projects, will quickly notice the differences between the IDEs, for example stability and productivity. Even though concentrating resources and R&D efforts is a good thing for CodeGear, in my eyes it's pretty much the same as declaring the "war" lost to Visual Studio. And what I'm missing is competition in .NET development tools.