>"no need to learn another one coz Borland will be releasing Delphi.Net." He feels secured because the tool he is using can play natively in the .NET arena without learning another one.

Point missed here. He may know Delphi syntactically, but he will have to learn the framework and its 3000+ classes just like the rest of us. Your friend may have syntax that looks like Delphi/Pascal - but to do anything with the CLR, he has the same learning curve as the other 5 million VB developers that are dreading the transition.