The point that MS created the CLR is not a big problem because Borland have lincense of .NET (is the only company with that, i think) and have priority acces (in fact, Borland say that .NET was made for Delphi ;) ), for that reason Borland put some things into Delphi 8 that not exist in other languages... Obvious with time each language can be enchanced for the things that are best suited (like the future enchancements to c++, c#, vb) and the same apply to Delphi. In this context, Delphi become the same: powerfull like C, easy like Basic... The reality is that for VB&C# MUST wait (more problematic to VB than C/C#) for a more RAD way to code, design & architect a aplication, Delphi not have this problem because is the same into .NET and out .NET, in this case, Delphi lead to the actual MS offering for 1-2 releases ;) plus the advantage to not drop Win32 and still keep the same code (and the portability to Linux is a plus, too)