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What is Delphi Prism?

Sometimes being on-site slows you down. The WiFi is spotty and just finding a change to sit down is a challenge. The news about Delphi Prism is out. What is Delphi Prism? It is Delphi with full .NET 3.5+ support running in Visual Studio, with a number of the high power database solutions you would expect from CodeGear / Embarcadero.

Behind the scenes, this is accomplished with a stack of

You put all that together and you have a pretty exciting solution for .NET development.

Check out the impressive list of language features available in Delphi Prism, that are not available in C#.  We talked about a lot of these in Episode 5.  Notably:

Not to mention all the cool things you can do with the database tools.

I am sure there is much more to come about Delphi Prism.

7 replies on “What is Delphi Prism?”

What ever happened to “Delphi IS the VCL” (Marco, June 27)?

I like the Oxygene idea, but to call it “Delphi” is a little silly.

On June 27 Marco Cantu wrote,
“…you should know what I think. For me, Delphi “is” the VCL. So any advance for Delphi should be bound to an advance to the VCL.

Nick states that CodeGear wants to be different, not play catch up with Microsoft feature by feature. I fully agree. If Delphi is the VCL, CodeGear is leading!”

Those are some excellent points. What Prism lets them do is have a .NET solution that doesn’t require them to play catch up, and lead in language features. I thought it would have been nice if they included some VCL.NET or RTL.NET (TStringList, etc.) with it too.

My guess is that is why they call it Delphi Prism: to indicate that it is different from Delphi, but also to not completely separate it. If they just called it Prism then it has no ties to Delphi. Kind of like what happened with Kylix, no one had any frame of reference for what Kylix was, but when you said “Delphi for Linux” then they got it. So when you say “Delphi Prism” then they know it has something to do with Delphi.

I guess my point is, if it’s just another implementation of Pascal for Whatever, then it’s not Delphi at all. It may as well be “Quick Pascal for the Net”.

The thing is, Delphi really IS the VCL. Was Turbo Pascal Delphi? Not without the VCL. Is “Delphi Prism” Delphi? Apply the same logic.

Delphi as I have known it appears to be officially abandoned now except for the “legacy Win32 support”.

Having said that, I still like Object Pascal better than C# (I’m also an ASP.NET MCP).

I would hardly relegate Delphi as abandoned except for legacy Win32 support. The next version code named Commodore is scheduled to have Win64 support. There continues to be a lot of Win32 development going on, so it is hardly a legacy.

Because of the code compatibility between Prism and Delphi native you could have a project that shared some business logic behind the scenes.

Jim,

I understand (and assent to) what you’re saying.

Perhaps, like me, you’re a twenty-year user of this Pascal compiler and all the wonderful improvements its IDE has seen. I just hate to see it all tossed out the window and become nothing more than another language variant for an MS platform and IDE.

I think having Oxygene is great. I really want a copy of my own. But to toss out Delphi, the IDE and the VCL? Give me a break!

And I, like you, hate that word “legacy” when it comes to my favorite tool. I don’t like being forced to used it.

Yes, I remember when code syntax highlighting was introduced in Turbo Pascal (forget the version number . . . .)

Delphi IDE and VCL are here for the long haul from what I see. What it came down to was CodeGear was putting a lot of resources into maintaining VCL.NET, RTL.NET, .NET Compiler, .NET Designers, etc. with very few people using the single source Win32 & .NET opportunities.

Everyone I talk to sees native development with Win32 and Win64 API sticking around for a long time. Here at Microsoft all the Windows 7 new features are still available in the Win32 API, and even Windows Azure (their cloud computing service) will run native code.

Delphi IDE, VCL and RTL will continue to cover native application development.

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