Nothing personal, but I'm getting tired of seeing nothing but blogs about WinForms, ASP.Net, Silverlight et al and nothing about VCL. I know from posts by Julian that the dotNet side of Developer Express's business is probably 10 to 20 times as large the VCL side.

But still, when was the last time a VCL related blog was posted? Over 80 blogs ago on Nov 25, 2008 or uver 70 blogs ago on Dec 4, 2008 (if consider Delphi Prism as VCL related). How many product training videos are there on the Devexpress Channel regarding VCL? Quick answer: none.

The VCL team has done some work over the past two years, they should be proud to post about their accomplishments. Too little communication can lead to frustration.

Mark

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:36:25 +0000 (UTC), "Mark Stals" <> wrote:

>Nothing personal, but I'm getting tired of seeing nothing but blogs
>about WinForms, ASP.Net, Silverlight et al and nothing about VCL.

Because no matter what Embarcadero or we do, the VCL third-party
market is stagnant as far as we can tell. It's the old argument about
resources: we only have so many (including in our video programming
department) and only so much time, and it makes sense to concentrate
efforts where it makes the most sense for us. And that means,
obviously, in areas where we know this kind of anciliary expenditure
comes back in terms of additional sales.

It's business sense: we spend money where we know/think/hope we can
recoup it. For the past three years, that just hasn't been VCL.

Frustrating to me is that the VCL market is so awful, despite a very
good Delphi release late last year.

>The VCL team has done some work over the past two years, they should
>be proud to post about their accomplishments. Too little communication
>can lead to frustration.

I'll ping them then to provide more content that I can blog about.

--
Cheers, Julian

-----------------------------------------------------------
Julian M Bucknall
CTO, Developer Express, www.devexpress.com
julianb@devexpress.com

Personal blog at http://www.boyet.com
Company blog at http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx
Author of "Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures"
Read my articles in PCPlus every month
-----------------------------------------------------------
|

Julian,

 

I can't blame your business sense. If it weren't for some high quality vendors like Developer Express I would have lost interest in Delphi as a programming language.

Stagnant as the VCL third-party market may be, it still is a market that brings in cash for Developer Express.
IMHO innovations and letting the market know about these innovations is needed to keep existing customers renewing or to get new ones, regardless of the product line. The sad case of Delphi is a case in point.

 

Have a nice day, Mark.

Hello All,

Unfortunately i have to agree with Julian here and totally understand his decesions and stand by them as a customer of DevExpress for the past 8 or so years.

Many many years back there was a product out for Delphi called RxLib which was developed for many years by a couple of very good developers (there names dont come to mind right now).

Around about version 6 \ 7 of delphi, the development of RxLib became stagnated and there were many unofficial releases of this which was causing me no end of frustration.  So under the guise of my company at the time, SGB Software, i approached the origonal developers of the library and offered them the chance to release the library to another company who would actively develop this with a small, yet very production team of developers who were all wiz kids with Delphi.

After a month of negotiating, arguements and a few stiff drinks, the guys agreed in principal and we took over the official development of RxLibrary.

This couldnt of come at a worse time for us, all our clients had started asking why is nothing in .net, its the future.  Well we kinda had to agree , yes its the future, but to convert our entire code base would of taken a solid year of development and testing and we just didnt have the resources to do so, especially after the investment we had just put into our current product and an oracle development platform which cost a silly amount of money.

Cut a long story short, within 9 months we was working on completing a full conversion from Delphi 7 to .net 1.1 and the forthcoming .net 2.0, our delphi development had gone from 100% to a little over 10% and the market was quickly becoming stagnent as .net took over.

In the end we got back in touch with the origonal developers of RxLibrary who were no longer interested in the active development of RxLibrary and we kinda left it at that.

I just did a quick search for it and there seems to be next to nothing going on with that any more and that was one of the most used libraries in delphi development.

I even remember one week paying nearly £1000 for the entire turbo power suite of components only for them to release them freely the week after :(.

All i can say is RIP Delphi and i hope embarco come up with a product that is going to kick the microsoft offers into shape as i have always preferred the borland \ embarco \ code gear development environments to visual studio.

Cheers.

> In the end we got back in touch with the origonal developers of
> RxLibrary who were no longer interested in the active development of
> RxLibrary and we kinda left it at that.
> I just did a quick search for it and there seems to be next to
> nothing going on with that any more and that was one of the most used
> libraries in delphi development.

RxLib is now full integrated in the JVC.

> Unfortunately i have to agree with Julian here and totally understand
> his decesions

I disagree. DevExpress makes self the market even smaller, if they
nothing more develop for the VCL. The subsription price is too high, if
only errors are cleaned up. Therefore, fewer subscriptions and fewer
librarys will be sold. And DexExpress will argue: The market is
becoming smaller ...

Joachim

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:33:19 +0000 (UTC), "Joachim Uersfeld" <> wrote:

>I disagree. DevExpress makes self the market even smaller, if they
>nothing more develop for the VCL.

And who the heck is saying we're not developing new functionality for
VCL? I think our major features for last year were well worth the
renewal pricing, and we don't intend to stop this year. We just
haven't decided on a roadmap yet.

The discussion here is whether we should be doing videos and blog
posts and spending money on ads about our VCL products. To which my
answer was, sure, of course, no dissent from me, but we don't have
that many resources/cash, so it makes sense to put those resources we
do have where they'll make the most difference for us. And that is the
..NET products.

And there's no way we can influence the sales of Delphi 2009. People
don't say, whoa, dude, DevExpress have this great QuantumExpressGrid
control, I must go buy Delphi 2009 so I can use it. Instead it's more
like: "I must write this app in 32-bit native code, what's out there?
Ah, Delphi 2009." And then we just hope they need our grid; after all
it's first in the results when googling "Delphi grid". Unfortunately
this last supposition seems to happen less and less.

--
Cheers, Julian

-----------------------------------------------------------
Julian M Bucknall
CTO, Developer Express, www.devexpress.com
julianb@devexpress.com

Personal blog at http://www.boyet.com
Company blog at http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx
Author of "Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures"
Read my articles in PCPlus every month
-----------------------------------------------------------
|

Would you consider open sourcing the VCL grids when the market has become unviable?

 

a

 When???

I think that has well passed now, i think the questions is would you consider open sourcing the VCL grid when the market totally stops.

I however dont think this will happen simply because they have never set the source free for any of there products that i am aware of, they still actively sell active x controls :) although i cant see them making any profit on these what so ever.

Cheers.

Hello andrew,

> Would you consider open sourcing the VCL grids when the market has
> become unviable?

But you can already get your hands on the source....https://www.devexpress.com/ClientCenter/OrderCenter.aspx?group=VCL

This is very true, anyone who buys a subscription can get the source, i think he leading more to freely available source code under one of the GPL licenses or whatever people publish them under now adays.

Scott

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:18:04 +0000 (UTC), "Scott Blood_1" <> wrote:

>they still actively sell active x controls :)

No, I'm afraid we don't any more. Stopped last year.

>although i cant see them making any profit on these what so ever.

And that's the reason...

--
Cheers, Julian

-----------------------------------------------------------
Julian M Bucknall
CTO, Developer Express, www.devexpress.com
julianb@devexpress.com

Personal blog at http://www.boyet.com
Company blog at http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx
Author of "Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures"
Read my articles in PCPlus every month
-----------------------------------------------------------
|

Andrew

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 06:42:47 +0000 (UTC), "andrew stuart" <> wrote:

>Would you consider open sourcing the VCL grids when the market
>has become unviable?

Blimey, who knows what will happen if the VCL control market totally
locks up. I'll bring the popcorn and the beer.

Anyway, it certainly isn't close to that yet -- we make enough to
support a dedicated team, for example, just not enough for the
ancillary content.

--
Cheers, Julian

-----------------------------------------------------------
Julian M Bucknall
CTO, Developer Express, www.devexpress.com
julianb@devexpress.com

Personal blog at http://www.boyet.com
Company blog at http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/ctodx
Author of "Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures"
Read my articles in PCPlus every month
-----------------------------------------------------------
|

I had to do some stuff with an animated gif in D7 today. Since I had to blow off the memory cobwebs and I don't want to lose my actions should this happen again, I blogged it for later memory. Since it specifically involves the RxLib, and not the other 'frustration' points of the OP, I won't hijack the thread but link to the post about using RxLib in D7. (As opposed to JVCL, which flickers for my specific animated gif).

Here's the link: http://development.tobiasopdenbrouw.nl/post/2009/04/08/Animated-Gif-in-Delphi-7.aspx

Interesting seeing people's frustrations, btw. I'm glad Muldis (where I work) has moved away from the Delphi line: the products were sometimes quite good, but the future so uncertain....

My post is not relevant.  I did not realise the thread was so old.

Though not relevant, your post got this thing going again and now its found itself to the venerable delphi.non-technical forum. Poor Julian's being quoted out-of-context....

Guys and Gals - if I was using Delphi and I saw some of the things we are doing for .NET, then I'd certainly be as frustrated as you are. Obviously we do not dedicate nearly the resources to the VCL as we do to .NET but this is entirely a function of market. I promise you, if we saw any real movment in the VCL market, we'd dedicate more resources to it....so rather than simply tell us why we dont support the VCL enough, please go out into the world and tell people about our tools and the VCL and help us all grow this market. That's the only real way this is going to work...just wishing it to happen won't change much.

Any day now, I plan on posting some info on things we have planned for the second half of the year for the VCL. They include (as most of you know already) a new QuantumTreeList, a new version of the Layout Control, a new version of the Printing System, and (drum roll) a new version of the QuantumGrid.