Episode 15
From Podcast Wiki at Delphi.org
Julain Bucknall on DevExpress
- Podcast 7:36m
Jim: Alright, so this is Jim McKeeth with the Podcast at Delphi.org here are PDC2008. I’m talking now with Julian Bucknall of DevExpress.
Julian: Hello
Jim: Chief Technology Officer
Julian: That’s right, indeed
Jim: So
Julian: We’re here I believe to talk about Delphi Prism
Jim: That’s right, Delphi Prism. Big announcement from Embarcadero – Delphi Prism, which is a Visual Studio add-in, adding Delphi Language to Visual Studio for .NET
Julian: That’s right, and the important thing for us is its Visual Studio, so all of our controls which already install inside Visual Studio for C# and VB – in theory – should be able to install into the Visual Studio that comes with Delphi Prism. Essentially what Microsoft have done is they’ve extracted everything out of visual studio that is language specific and they give that away for free. They call that the Visual Studio Shell.
Jim: Right
Julian: And Embarcadero have taken the visual studio shell and they’ve added their own language service for Delphi and they’ve called the whole thing Delphi Prism.
Jim: OK
Julian: As I say, in theory, our components should install straight away into Delphi Prism. And you’ll be able to use our WinForms components like our grids, our tree lists, our reporting stuff, and also ASP.NET, you know all of our components for ASP.NET, and of course coming up our WPF components and SilverLight should all work out of the box, as it were. Now obviously there is going to have to be a little testing here.
Jim: Yeah
Julian: That’s the plan.
Jim: Now you have, right now you have two lines. You have the VCL line.
Julian: That’s right
Jim: And the .NET
Julian: Well it’s mostly about platform. Let’s say platform: The VCL Line and the .NET Line. The .NET line is actually split up into four or five, you know, things: you have WinForms, ASP.NET, we have our frameworks: XPO (eXpress Persistent Objects) and XAF (eXpressApp Framework), which are for building business applications.
Julian: And then we have our productivity tools for Visual Studio, like CodeRush and Refactor! Pro. And we are slowly but surely getting our WPF and SilverLight stuff ready to go.
Jim: I think this is pretty exciting because DevExpress used to be mostly focused
Julian: We were, yes we were, yes. In fact, round about now is ah, I can’t remember which particular date it is, but right about now is our 10th anniversary. And 10 years ago we started marketing the QuantumExpress Grid. The first version.
Jim: Yes
Julian: The very first version. So in those days we were a Delphi shop all the way through. Once 2001 came around – Microsoft started, you know, betaing .NET and Visual Studio with managed code in C# and all that kind of stuff. We started going for that as well.
Jim: So this is exciting because now Delphi developers will have access to your whole suite of components.
Julian: That’s right, Delphi developers for .NET. We never really got onto the VCL for .NET side of things, with Delphi for .NET or Delphi 8. Mainly because we were of the opinion that if we wanted to write .NET components, it had to be for everybody to use who programmed in .NET. That basically meant the playing field was C# and VB. Having to program to VCL.NET would mean essentially shut out all of those people.
Jim: Yeah, right. A lot of people I have talked to are in the same situation.
Julian: Right
Jim: It just makes sense to do
Julian: That’s why Delphi Prism is so important because VCL.NET, long rest its soul, is going away, and it’s just going to be a pure .NET language. You don’t have of these extra assemblies to ship.
Jim: So you mentioned productivity tools.
Julian: Yeah CodeRush and Refactor! Pro.
Jim: So CodeRush for those who remember was a Delphi offering
Julian: It used to be a Delphi offering.
Jim: Delphi 5 through 7?
Julian: We stopped developing it after Delphi 7, mainly because the Borland IDE for Delphi changed from Delphi 7 to Delphi 8. The R&D team created this new IDE – the codename at the time was Gallileo, if you remember that far back I just about remember that far back.
Jim: Yes
Julian: And they changed the entire interface to the IDE. And that was roughly at the same time, well it was exactly the same time, that Microsoft made a go of Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2003 was coming out. And 2005 was being worked on. So we decided to take CodeRush, or basically the ideas in CodeRush for Delphi, and apply them to Visual Studio.
Jim: So now CodeRush, a lot of what CodeRush does is language specific.
Julian: Definitely, yeah.
Jim: So now that it is in Visual Studio, you already have the hooks to be able to write in the IDE and get those behaviors in there.
Julian: Yeah, right.
Jim: So now it is just a matter of teaching it to deal with Delphi Prism
Julian: Well, the essence is underneath both CodeRush and Refactor! Pro is a common parser engine and code generator engine. And I mean that engine actually works with C# and VB and JavaScript and C++ and ASP.NET and XAMAL, and all those kind of things. It actually works with those kind of languages. In other words the parser will be able to parse them and identify the actually sytax and the tokens of different languages. Now in theory. . .
Jim: In theory
Julian: In theory we can then say: Well, Delphi Prism is a Visual Studio inhabitant now and in theory we just basically take and we tokenize Delphi code, Pascal, and you know, create the same symbol trees and use those symbol trees to generate Pascal code and so on and so forth – in theory. So that’s, we are having talks with Embarcadero at the moment. In fact here are PDC we had a chat with Nick Hodges and Allen Bauer and it could be a feature. We are going to find out how much it is going to take and how long its going to take and so on and so forth. So CodeRush may be coming back to Delphi.
Jim: That is very exciting, very exciting.
Julian: Indeed.
Jim: Excellent, good to hear it. Everyone I talk to is really excited about the possibilities.
Julian: Yeah, absolutely, I think so too.
Good, well thank you for your time.
Julian: Thank you Jim. It’s a pleasure as always. Thank you. Jim: Maybe we can get you on the podcast again
Julian: Absolutely
Jim: Thank-you
