>He, I think you got it the wrong way round. MS products tend to trail the market for years before they catch up with the competition, even if they outsell the competition much earlier (MS is very good at owning markets via its marketing/legal departments - I mean how can spend hundreds of millions on marketing a single product?). Sometimes they even manage to put the competition out of the market without ever getting their product to a comparable level ...

I've said for years that Microsoft is a marketing company. However, in this case, I don't have it wrong. Microsoft created .NET and is the company that continues to improve it. There could be the possiblity that the CLR will introduce new features that are taken advantage of in MS languages, while the competition has to wait one rev.

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>As regards Delphi vs. VS.NET: Borland has been doing Delphi for a very long time, they started long before MS bought Anders Hejlsberg from them to re-invent it in the shape of .NET. Also, Borland has quite a bit of incentive to deliver because they want to get a share of the market, while MS already 'has' it and will make a lot of sales simply based on inertia as usual. That's why I trust Borland to teach MS a lesson or two about creating RAD environments for .NET. Just compare building apps in VC++ to doing the same in Borland's C++Builder ...

It depends on what you're doing. User interfaces are easier in Borland C++ Builder than VC++, but doing COM is MUCH easier in the Microsoft product.


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>I am not very fond of the Delphi language but if I have to do an exe/dll that cannot be done in Fox and that doesn't contain enough crunchy portions to warrant using C++ then I use Delphi for it.

That's old technology when compared to .NET. This isn't a valid arguement.

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>Unfortunately I haven't had the time yet to try out Builder X and Delphi 8, so I cannot report actual experience with the products.