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I have a family member who is at the start of an important new government project that will involve a Windows application. One of the consultants is advising them to base the new project on Delphi. I am strongly in favor of Visual Studio.
I was wondering how experts on this forum feel about Delphi versus VS?
Please let us know your preferences. Thanks!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Delphi is too expensive for me, and support seems edgy, I would stick with your idea and use Visual Studio If it were 2003 or 2005 sure, use Delphi, but I would stick with VS. Also, Delphi docs suck.
i cri evry tiem
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Consider the company, the resources, the community, and the masses and masses of code and support available to .NET developers. Compare to Delphi.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I do not like anything by Embarcadero, and have always had more trouble with their products then with Microsoft, even when Borland owned the line before Embarcadero.
I would use C# and Visual Studio, personally.
Delphi, is a language. Visual Studio is an IDE, not a language.
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I thought Delphi was a platform and Object Pascal the language.
i cri evry tiem
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Well, that's a tricky situation. Originally, Delphi (the platform) used Object Pascal, but then Borland began evolving the language and it became Delphi. There were some minor syntax deviations initially, but now there are all kinds of extensions (e.g. generics, anonymous methods) that exist in Delphi that aren't in Object Pascal. If you want more information or just want to get even more confused, head on over to the Object Pascal wikipedia page[^].
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Oh that makes me laugh, back in the 90s, when Borland owned Delphi I was in precisely the same boat, Govt department wanted to rewrite an app I had built using SuperBase into Delphi. I refused to have anything to do with it so they paid me to write the specs for the redevelopment.
Some years later I asked the primary stakeholder what the result was. IT WAS NEVER REBUILT. They could not get enough resources at a reasonable rate to do the job.
And here we are, almost 20 years later, and rotten bloody consultant is still trying it on!
Listen to CM.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Excuse me...
Have you said SuperBase? do you mean that Access like database system that came in a cardboard box that was like a leather case with SuperBase written in an Indiana Jones like font?
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Yep that's the one although that was very much the later design, they tried a number of designs, none worked well. It was a competitor to access but was nothing like it. Competing with ms was painful.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I worked with that software at one company that used it to store data and to perform programming tasks.
It was very limited and the people in the IT department there ended up developing several things in C++ and putting them into a DLL to be used from SuperBase... 
At that time (20+ years ago) I was like: "does anyone else works with this?" but it seems that it was... 
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It never did reach critical mass, then it got sold and sold and eventually was so marginalised I think it disappeared. I made a comfortable living in the 90s building solutions using it and was sad to see it die, especially as the alternative was access. It was nice being able to turn up with 2 360k disks and have your database and solution installed.
I used Delphi for a while and eventually got into the dress vb6.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Looks like that consultant knows only three things:
1. Delphi.
2. Delphi.
3. Delphi.
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Avijnata, how long you been around here? You know it should be
0.
1.
2.
(Notice the joke icon)
Mongo: Mongo only pawn... in game of life.
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Consultants may not know how to reckon from zero. 
Because, money is never reckoned from zero, isn't it? And consultants only (know how to) count money.
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Option Base 1
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
"When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey
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Visual Studio means not much other than the programming environment. Let's say you mean .Net and/or native coding (C/C++).
If your goal is Windows (i.e. desktop apps, GUI, etc), there's nothing better than .Net/C#/WPF etc.
However, the resulting .Net assemblies are typically easy to disassemble, and any obfuscation yields limited results (at least for WPF apps). Since I needed some hard-to-disassemble code, I moved some pieces of UI-less software to Lazarus/Free-Pascal, which is a free Delphi alternative.
Why not C/C++ instead of Pascal? Simply because the same Pascal code works on almost any platform, than the typical non-standardized C/C++.
Yeah: I really hate C/C++...
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Ask him why. Maybe he knows that some code is reusable for the project. Normmaly the consultants knows "only" Delphi and so he suggests it.
I would advise you, make the interfaces/files/data open standards like the database is SQL, files in text or xml to avoid the dependency from Microsoft data formats.
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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Visual Studio is neither a language nor a framework, so why would you recommend it?
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OK, I meant to say a combination of C# and VS as opposed to Delphi.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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In my opinion, Microsoft documentation is better.
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I would go with VS any day 
It's much cheaper, and support from the .net community pretty much rocks!
Best,
John
-- LogWizard Meet the Log Viewer that makes monitoring log files a joy!
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These days, for GUI applications I would definitely recommend C# over Delphi. The languages are quite similar at their core (they were designed by the same person) but it is orders of magnitude harder to find developers skilled in Delphi.
For recruitment, and for maintainability, C# is a much better option. If you find you need to fix something three years after deployment, finding a Delphi developer to do it will be very expensive.
I mainly use C# and C++, but worked with Delphi in the mid-90s and mid-noughties, so do occasionally get calls from recruiters desperate to find someone with Delphi experience. And they are desperate.
Sounds like the consultant is either not as knowledgeable about the field as you should be able to expect, or is angling for a long-term contract with no competition.
The only reason to start a new Delphi project these days is if you have a large amount of tried and tested existing Delphi code you want to re-use. Even so, in that case I'd package that into DLLs and call from a C# application.
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You are totally right. Getting skilled programmers is an important issue, it can kill projects.
Dlls are a really good point for using C# - even if a big codebase is in Delphi. The hammer bonus is the clear interface and no one will fizzle in the old code.
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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