Re: Moving from Delphi to Visual Studio. Smart move??

[Quoted] In article <1085790518.102870_at_yasure>, Daniel Morgan says...
>
>Gijsie wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We are a small company (2 developers, 6 other people) and develop "out of
>> the box" applications for local government. Our databaseplatform is Oracle.
>> We will stick with Oracle since all out customers will stick with Oracle. We
>> develop in Borland Delphi (with DOA-components) and in Borland JBuilder
>> (with JDBC). We are now considering to change our main development platform
>> from Delphi to Microsoft Visual Studio.
>>

Moving away from Delphi is certainly a good idea. The two main choices for software development today are Java and .NET (VB or C#). In addition to VS you may also want to consider Eclipse (Java). Eclipse is as easy as VS, may be nicer. Is Linux important to you at all - now or in the future? If so Eclipse is a better choice. If you are not interested in Linux VS is a better choice.

>> Things that worry me:
>> Does Visual Studio always asume you are working with MSSQL.

No. VS is better tested with MSSQL, but it also works with Oracle. Oracle provides ADO.NET drivers. Also, recently Oracle and Microsoft announced they are going to cooperate to make Oracle programming easier in a .NET environment.

>> Will we have to use ODBC.

If a .NET driver is not available, which is not the case for Oracle.

>> Can you keep deploying simple. (I want to have one exe that can run from a
>> CD)
>>

Just like with Java, the machine should have the .NET runtime environment.

>> Can anyone please share their experience with developing in Visual Studio
>> towards Oracle databases. And what version (Professional, Enterprise or
>> Architect) do you recommend. And should I worry about totally different
>> things?

VS is a good choice, bot also consider Java.

>
>Almost every large .NET project of which I am aware has had very
>big problems. I would stay away from it unless there was a compelling
>reason to change.

[Quoted] That's about as vague a comment as you can make. What kind of "big" problems? .NET has no "big problems".

>
>To start with ... what is the business case for making any change from
>what you have to something else? You've provided on reason for doing
>anything differently in the future. What is motivating this?

[Quoted] Delphi is a dead end.

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>Daniel Morgan

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