I have just gone back into Delphi to work on an update to my product: cvSee, the Delimited Text File Editor. having invested thousands of dollars in this development language and third-party components, I am quickly getting frustrated with it. I earned a c# certificate at SDSU and have worked with Visual Basic since version 1 and the state of Microsoft’s tools has gotten orders of magnitude better over the years. So, I have my choice of programming languages.
In Delphi 2007 the Help System has now just crashed. It contains nothing, not even the unwanted and unneeded and enigmatic Visual Studio help. I have both VS 2005 and 2008 and the help works fine in them, so its not that. Nothing changed on my system except the continual MS Vista updates. But then one day, the IDE started to crash on exit and a couple of days later, the help way missing. I have replaced the Welcome page with the http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/ page just so some help is there, but I am considering installing my Delphi 7 help and getting the Ctrl-F1 wizard.
Actually, what’s the point? I only have one product out written in Delphi 2007. Porting that to c# would be no problem. I’ll probably do that for version 2. All my other projects and clients want C# or VB.Net. I can’t find contracts in Delphi anymore unless I want to leave my family for an extended stay thousands of miles from home. No thanks.
Seriously, the help issue has plagued me (and others) long enough. I am quickly running out of reasons to develop with Delphi. Borland/Inprise/Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero/???: please give me a reason to buy multi-thousand dollar software when Microsoft gives VS to me for a couple of hundred for becoming a partner and jumping through a few advantageous hoops. And VS has a much better editor. In just a few years they have leap-frogged you. Their code-completion is much faster and more useful.
Give me a reason!
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