It was announced few days ago that Windows 7 has RTM and very soon it will be publicly available. I have been already playing with Windows 7 RC in the VMWare image and it really looks nicer as Vista.
At the same time the first sneak preview of the upcoming Delphi 2010 has been published here: http://www.embarcadero.com/rad-studio-2010/. It covers some of the very cool new IDE usability features, like IDE Insight for keyboard access to everything via F6, new debugger visualizers and thread debugging. Really cool stuff:-)
Delphi and C++Builder are the best tools for building native Windows applications, from Windows device drivers and services, games, instant messengers, like Skype, to enterprise database solutions. Microsoft is advocating writing Windows applications in managed code, on the .NET platform. We do provide Delphi Prism as part of the RAD Studio to leverage .NET capabilities. However the Windows operating system itself, the .NET Common Language Runtime, and everything else where execution speed and performance is critical is written in unmanaged, native code that executes "closer to the metal". This is where Delphi and C++Builder excel! Tim Anderson in his post "Native code makes a comeback - except it never away" has some good points on this subject as well.
The very good example why native code continues to be important is new Windows 7 Direct2D graphics. I like the quote from MSDN Magazine June 2009 issue "Introducing Direct2D" where author sums it up:
(…) if you want to develop high-performance and high-quality commercial applications, you’ll still look to C++ and native code to deliver that power. (…)
That is why Delphi and C++Builder developers are not looking to move away from native to managed code.
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Windows device drivers ?
Are you sure ?! … DDK4D is mostly abandonware and developing device driver in Delphi was never supported by Borland/CG …
If you have any links/hints to demonstrate what you said … I’ll be very pleased
Too bad they didn’t use Windows 7 in Delphi 2010 video.
Device drivers? I don’t think so….
Didn’t Nick Hodges comment about drivers a while ago (he said that delphi was meant for Application Development and drivers would not be supported).
OK. Writing device drivers in Delphi is really arcane, and probably this is not the mainstream of Delphi development, however it can be done!
Please check this http://petertattam.com/?p=19 for more details.
Windows device drivers ?Are you sure ?! … DDK4D is mostly abandonware
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just google "KMDKiT4D" and see by yourself
@DeltaAziz and @all,
I’m not saying that Delphi is the tool of choice for building device drivers for Windows. My point is that you can use Delphi to build almost all kinds of software for Windows from some low level stuff to enterprise applications:-)
Pawel,
without support of the new Windows 7 taskbar (jump lists, progress, overlay icon etc..) it’s not reasonable to upgrade to Delphi 2010 for me and I guess for many other delphi coders. I think support of Windows 7 taskbar SDK have to be included in Delphi 2010. What do you think?
@Brad,
Delphi 2010 officially supports Windows 7 and works great on this OS
@Dan,
I believe it is matter of time to have Windows 7 Taskbar API wrapped into some nice VCL classes. IMHO for the time being there is nothing that stops you from talking directly to Win7 API of any kind
@Pawel, @Brad: watch my blog on Thursday, October 1st for the upcoming release of the Windows 7 controls for Delphi 7+.
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[...] code” versus “managed/.Net code” vond ik de volgende gedeelte van de blog van Pawel Glowacki wel mooi: Tim Anderson in his post “Native code makes a comeback – except it never [...]
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