> Well you don't want to kill of the market for 3rd party components.
Sure, this is why I don't think Borland needs to add all those components at all. There simply must be a strategy on how to work with 3rd party vendors to make sure that components are available and that there's competition between vendors and everybody is happy ;).
> The major thing the VCL needs is unicode. I personally think this one > enhancement would get a number of companies upgrading to the latest > version. Just think if all of those cool DevExpress/TMS (insert 3rd > party here) components supported unicode.
I'm not really sure. Why would you really need unicode, unless you are in China? Most of the users can work it out perfectly with Ansi and save trouble of thinking how many characters string contains (remember, once you go unicode, unless you do UCS4 you don't know the number of chars in string unless you iterate it). Unicode is not an easy thing to support and there are a lot more problems with VCL then this one - which is important, but I doubt that it will result in more sales for CG.
> The problem is that Borland has been too conservative about approaching > the unicode subject. They seem to be looking for the perfect solution > which isn't always possible without a little pain.
And I understand them perfectly. I don't know a perfect solution. Frankly, I would develop a brand new VCL from scratch (almost) instead of adding features to existing VCL.
> Having something (that works for 50% of users), is sometimes better > than having nothing.
It depends if the users really want it. I feel, that the main problem is that Borland/CG fail to deliver "sense of innovation". The users don't feel that they're working with cutting edge stuff. Microsoft has pushed that boundary far away with .Net. My feeling here is that everyone in this NG will cry out "release Unicode and Win64", but once it is released, there will be very few sales still. Why? I guess because there are still very few people here to make the difference. In order to push sales you need hype. In order to produce hype you need to invent something "cool" and promote it loudly (something like "super-duper new rad approach to database development - create your whole application automatically from database schema in 3 mouse clicks"). This is what we really need more then any particular feature.
On top of that we need IDE that is superior in speed & quality to VS. Is that too much to ask? ;))
> Also you need to remember that VCL.NET also gets these improvements and > with VCL.NET being the framework of choice for the Compact Framework > this is important. While many don't care about VCL.NET - some folks do.
I don't know really. I think VCL.Net is a huge waste of time. If you do .Net, you use C#. Choosing VCL.Net is a very strange approach to .Net. I, personally, don't know anybody who even think about going this route, while almost everybody now do something with .Net. There's been so much criticism on how Delphi.Net sucks compared to C# that I don't even want to go into it. I'd rather simply use C# or Chrome. Producing VCL.Net is like creating Turbo Vision for Windows... imho.
> Some also might ask why the vcl still doesn't have native support for > PNG images, why come controls still don't paint with a themed look and > feel under XP.
That's a good question! ;) Also, PNG is not a problem with free PNG libraries available for years. But ImageList editor sucks big time and hasn't really been updated... ever.
> Maybe your QC entries are under a different name because searching on > your surname reveals a donut of entries.
I didn't post QC. I don't believe in posting QC such as, "please reimplement db-awareness using interfaces" - this is just absurd. Either CG will figure it out (cause it's quite obvious) or they don't [have resource]. QC will not help there, I believe. They should make their own decisions. QC is good for asking to add a property X to class Y, or report a bug. IMHO.
My sort of emotional response to Nick was because of the "improvements" he mentioned. They just sounded really pathetic to me ;(. I mean it's sad. If this is what we are proud of... then we are just dead. Just look at how many things MS has released over the last 5 years. Tons of innovative technologies! What did Borland do? If not for MS, we would have never even see generics in Delphi - and we didn't even see them yet... Delphi lacks features tremendously. If they don't see it, no QC will help. If they need QC to see how much IDE sucks, then we should probably just run away - there's no hope in guiding blind people with QC through the realms of software development.
The point of what I was saying is that VCL should really be redesigned to today's standard. Any particular feature doesn't bother me - I can always find replacement components that do it.
Michael