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How Delphi and C# Are More Alike Than You May Know

With the upcoming release of Delphi support for Android there is a lot of interest from developers who are not currently using Delphi, most notably C# developers. Delphi provides a great solution for sharing as much of your source code, skills and development efforts as you want across the 4 major platforms, while still building high performance, native applications.

Delphi and C# are more alike than most people realize. I am doing a webinar to that end: “A Common Ancestry: How Delphi and C# Are More Alike Than You May Know.” It is the first in a 3 part webinar series called You Can Bring it With You: Leverage Your .NET Expertise in an iOS & Android World. The other two webinars are “From One Framework to Another: Leverage Your .NET Investments for iOS and Android Development,” and “Mano a Mano: A Survey of Mobile Development Options for .NET Developers,” by Marco Cantu and John Thomas, respectively.

The webinars start Tuesday, August 27th, with two a day for 3 days in a row. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone online. If you have a specific question you can leave it here and I may be able to incorporate it in the webinar, if not then I will be sure to cover it during the live Q&A.

19 replies on “How Delphi and C# Are More Alike Than You May Know”

>With the upcoming release of Delphi support for Android there is a lot of
>interest from developers who are not currently using Delphi, most notably C#
>developers

Why would that be, if they can use Xamarin’s product to develop for Android and iOS (and Linux) with C#/.Net?

I would think if you are a C# developer than Xamarin would have much more skill reuse than Delphi. And I think in terms of code reuse Xamarin deliberately steered away from having a single UI that is replicated across platforms due to the problems with that approach, a UI that is not quite right on any platform. But you can get good code reuse with the back end code in Xamarin.

You mean C# has as many unresolved and won’t-fix bugs and slow, broken fundamental components as Delphi? That might be hard to believe – but maybe you’re right. It would certainly explain why there is so much flaky software available. I’d put it down to green graduates of Joe’s Kafe and Komputa Kolij.

“Xamarin deliberately steered away from having a single UI that is replicated across platforms due to the problems with that approach, a UI that is not quite right on any platform. ”

That’s one way to put it, but I believe that it’s just too hard to make a UI designer/framework for them. Delphi/Firemonkey framework is leapyears ahead in this.

As always, ignorance runs deep and strong in the Delphi community. Keep your head firmly planted in the sand and pretend everything else is vastly inferior to Delphi, and eventually it will become true — in your fantasy world, at least.

Sometimes I think Delphi’s worst enemies are the poisonous developers who sneer and snipe at every improvement. Nothing, according to them, can be done right. It’s repugnant.

I’m not surprised if C# developers are interested in cross-platform Delphi. The FireMonkey UI platform is a clear (and better) difference to Xamarin, for one thing. IMO there should be more advertising (in places non-Delphi developers see it) about the X-platform features and the language, perhaps directly comparing it to C#, but native.

I wouldn’t have commented if I hadn’t read the comments above – I normally silently read most blog posts. But good work, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the final Android support looks like.

Sorry craigvn, I was mixing up Xamarin with that other product from Dwarfland’s company. Xamarin does indeed look great.

I am playing with LiveCode and think it has better approach for building multi platform apps be it windows, linux, Mac Os, iOS or Android.

I’ve been away from Delphi for more than a decade, but I’m looking forward to a native(as in true native) Android solution that is hopefully more RAD than the NDK.

Go Embarcardero!

As always remobjects company blaming against delphi developers. Very strange because we, the delphi developers, cash your food for years. Dwarfland (or marc hoffman), why just don’t stop blaming your loyalty customers and understand how much Oxygene sucks compared to fire monkey? Theres no advantage on using Oxygene, just code in pascal. You need to learn every platform and add to it you don’t have visual designers. Why don’t better focus on a produce a better remotable library? I suggest you start supporting delphi for mobile, you will loose a lot of sales for your stupid ego.
The same ego makes one and another time blame delphi users. They are happy and seems like the tool they use is ok. Do you really think you disqualifying delphi will get more users to your experiment?

I know, it’s a rather radical concept: if you want to develop for a platform, you head to LEARN ABOUT THE PLATFORM. What a shocker.

(Also, Oxygene has visual designers just given but keep repeating the lie and eventually it may become “truthy”.

@dwarfland, With FM is not needed to learn in depth the platform. Head it, is a advantage over Oxygene, sorry!
Show me a blog with the visual designers of oxygene… Not external designers, complicated to be used in conjunction with Visual Studio. Using xcode + visual studio is a pain, same for Android and … i have no idea what external designer you use for android, put the name here:______

Anyway, on delphi, you have all the flexibility on the ide, designer and code same place, nor strange steps to refresh , and let that edit the go to xcode and comeback, what a cr*p!

And yes, with Delphi XE5 you can develop for iphone and just change a single option, rebuild and voila, you have a working android app. No learning curves, no unneeded in depth platform stuff. Simple and easy. The opposite to Oxygene way.

If you think you can develop for a platform without knowing it, you are deluding yourself — no matter what you’re being promised. That’s a pretty inarguable fact, and all the results we see from people trying to do otherwise pretty much prove it. Nothing else to say about that, really.

Dwarfland, im still waiting the visual designers Oxygene have, you named before (telling i’m a lier) Where they are? Some screen capture?

it is always necessary to learn the platform APIs and the hardware. Sometimes, you’ll need to go deeper into the OS and to the hardware (if you can). Using Delphi and FM does not keep you from internals and APIs. We’ve shown many examples where we use code to get inside when we have to.

All of the RTL, VCL and FM source code is there so you can see what we are doing, use it for the ultimate documentation and also to learn how to dive deep if you want to. Source is included in Pro version and up (not Starter or Trial).

I’m going to close comments. These have diverged from the topic of C# developers learning more about Delphi and have fallen into a battle of development tools.

There are lots of great tools out there for development. Everyone chooses the one they like best that solves the problem at hand. There is nothing wrong with learning more about other tools, but the answer of which tool is better will never be answered.

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