No not THAT Borland ... Oh no no no , I mean THIS one.
I give you Borlands Australia - purveyors of Macadamia Shortbread on a Chocolate base. What a stroke of genius to combine the 2nd great gift of the Scots, with the great Aussie "bush tucker" Nut, and dip it in Chocolate. Now if only they produced a low-sugar version for Diabetics .... well I can dream can't I.
Speaking of Dream Products, as you may know I've been a Delphi 7 hold-out for some time. Full disclosure: CodeGear are pro-active at making sure all 3rd parties have a license of the latest products, those go straight to our VCL Dev team which is how we can be so quick to release compatible updates when CodeGear ships a new release. Personally I still use D7 for Native Development, although I did use D2009 recently to do the CodeRage presentations and it really did feel
like a better Delphi 7. Lately
I've been trialing Delphi 2010 and that to me feels like a better Delphi 2009.
We have probably all heard of the "Even numbered Delphi" myth, and from most reviews it's clear that Delphi went through a tough patch earlier this decade, but it seems to me that all the releases since Borland sold CodeGear to Embarcadero have shown significant incremental quality improvements. I can't say that I need Touch or Gestures but with Win 7's release this week they are certainly timely, Plenty of minor usability features in the IDE like IDE insight are a whole bunch of "nice to have" and I'd personally like to start seeing what I can do with the new RTTI.
Of course Developer Express will continue to make components for whichever versions of Delphi most of our customers use (currently 6,7,2005,2006,2007,2009,2010 for Build 47 ), but I'm personally going to get with the times (although I will miss CodeRush).
BTW: If you think that CodeGear are adding features to Delphi that aren't relevant to you, let them know by spending 30 mins on their Delphi 2010 Survey. Personally I put a vote toward Native cross-compilation for the IPhone, even if that may not specifically be an opportunity for DX, I reckon that would be a must upgrade feature for me personally and I was glad to see it on the Poll rather than having to write it in. Disagree with me? Go vote on the poll for what features you want CodeGear to spend their limited resources on.