CF with Delphi

Sun, February 27, 2005, 07:41 AM under MobileAndEmbedded
I would like CF development to be accessible to *everyone*. No personal gain in that statement (I've always had an MSDN universal subscription and I don't plan, in the near future, to write in anything other than C# and VB), I just want the platform to gain more developers/users.

It is sad that there is no SDK for CF 1.0 and that VS.NET 2003 Professional and above is required. Even though CF 2.0 comes with an SDK and VS2005 Standard is adequate, I am still not happy that the Express editions will not support Smart Device projects.

On the programming language front, dotnet is about multiple languages being able to target the platform (20+ on the desktop). On the other hand, CF only allows C# and VB.NET! No J#, no managed C++ etc. If you are thinking "it all compiles down to IL at the end of the day", unfortunately that is not enough: some IL instructions such as localloc and calli are not supported and design time support is more complex.

So, in the context of the above, I was disappointed to read this post on the Delphi blog (via Tim Anderson).

Will an MSFT reply be forthcoming?