The MicroISV Show Interview

Just noticed that my MicroISV Show interview is online.  I spent about 30 minutes talking with Bob Walsh and Michael Lehman about a variety of topics, including independent software development and RSS-related stuff.

Comments

[Matt T.]

Why would you choose C# over Delphi for a new app? Do you feel the developer benefits outweigh the speed hit and framework requirements?

[Nick Bradbury]

The main reason is that after working alongside .NET developers at NewsGator, I feel like I have to do a lot of work to accomplish things that are dead simple with C#.

Unicode support is a good example - I've had to do a ton of coding to get FeedDemon to support Unicode (especially in the VCL), whereas in C# it would've been relatively easy.

[Nick Hodges]

Hey Nick --

I'd love to talk to you about this --

[email protected]

Nick Hodges
Delphi Product Manager

[lb]

Hi Nick,

Great interview. I just realised I've used all your products, starting with HomeSite -- but only knew of you as the Top Style author.

You're a serial success story, not unlike Ray Ozzie or EvHead. The hits keep coming!

I look forward to seeing whatever comes next. No pressure though ;-)

lb

[Darrel D]

Nick,
I really enjoyed the interview. I have decided to go down the MicroISV path myself and have spent alot of time/effort researching development options. I would love to use C#/.Net because of the tools but have almost decided to use Delphi for the Win32 'lightness'.

Based on your experience with your NewsGator associates, do you really think C#/.Net is ready for standalone desktop apps? What frightened me was the framework download requirements since I know alot of my customers will not have the latest and greatest hardware.

[Nick Harris]

Hey Darrel -

I'm the other Nick from NewsGator, who does use C# to write both desktop addins (Outlook, FireFox, IE) and standalone desktop apps (NewsGator Desktop and our screensaver).

I've also written a handful of standalone desktop apps in Delphi at my previous job.

In my opinion, C# is the way to go both now and for the foreseeable future. WinForms development between Delphi and .Net is pretty much the same experience in terms of layout and design, but I find C# better for the backend stuff like worker threads and data serialization... especially for so called hybrid applications that rely heavily on web services. Beyond WinForms, WPF is where desktop applications are going which makes C# the better choice as well.

As far as the framework download requirement, I wouldn't worry much about that anymore. Vista installs with 3.0 and 2.0 is being pushed out via Automatic Updates. Most likely your users won't even know their running a .Net application. It gets trickier when dealing with enterprise deployments, so it may depend on your targeted market.