About Turbo Delphi
Sunday, 8 February 2009 by alexandrulI used to love coding in Delphi, but:
- the only free version of Delphi is Turbo Delphi Explorer 2006, which:
- is a bit old
- requires .NET Framework 1.x, in despite of the fact that it can be made independent of any version of .NET Framework (with some limitions in the capabilities of the IDE) or can work just fine with .NET Framework 2.0+
- it seems to be treated as a bad idea which should not be allowed to exist anymore
- the competition has:
- free up-to-date versions (Visual Studio 2008 Express editions)
- 90 days trials (not 14 or 30 days like Delphi)
- much lower prices: Turbo Delphi Professional 2006 is the least expensive, includes only one language but is more expensive than Visual Studio 2008 Standard which includes 4
- Delphi 8 was unusable, Delphi 2005 wasn't worth his price, Delphi 2006 managed to be allmost ok and after that I switched to C#
IMHO, the marketing managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Unless they decide to offer free upgrade to Delphi 2009 for all the customers of Delphi 8 or greater, in which case it might regain it's user base.