VCL.NET – End of life notification

VCL.NET – End of life notification

We are officially announcing the end of life for VCL.NET support in IntraWeb. IntraWeb will no longer be supported for the .NET personalities of BDS 2005, BDS 2006, or RDS 2007. The Win32 Delphi and C++ personalities of BDS 2005, BDS 2006, or RDS 2007 will continue to be supported.

Background

IntraWeb 10 has been released for RAD Studio 2009 and is bundled with it. IntraWeb 10 has not been officially released for any environment other than RAD Studio 2009. Much of this is because the Unicode support in RAD Studio 2009 affected a lot of non Unicode source and we have been testing and fixing those areas. However a large portion was also related to VCL.NET. We have long since believed that CodeGear planned to Kylix (a.k.a. drop support for) VCL.NET. VCL.NET has only a small following yet consumes a lot of our resources to support. Though CodeGear has not officially announced the Kylixing of VCL.NET the future is obvious to us. With the lack of VCL.NET support in RAD Studio 2009 and the announcement of Delphi Prism we believe that VCL.NET will in fact be Kylixed.

Because of these factors we have held up the release of IntraWeb 10 but do not wish to continue to delay its official release for environments other than RAD Studio 2009. We are now officially dropping all VCL.NET support and will focus exclusively on native code compilers.

Supported Environments

We will continue to support older environments including all the way back to Delphi 5. For IntraWeb 10 our supported environments will be:

  • Delphi 5
  • Delphi 6
  • C++ Builder 6
  • Delphi 7
  • Borland Developer Studio 2005 – C++ and Delphi
  • Borland Developer Studio 2006 – C++ and Delphi
  • RAD Studio 2007 – C++ and Delphi
  • RAD Studio 2009 – C++ and Delphi

C++

We are still resolving some long standing issues with C++. However we remain committed to C++ support and hope to have the final issues resolved shortly. We are investigating which C++ versions that we need to continue to support and would like to reduce the environments we support to reduce support resources. However we have no plans to drop any environment used by C++ users. Currently we know that RAD Studio 2009, Borland Developer Studio 2006, and C++ Builder 6 are in common use. However we are investigating how many users are using Borland Developer Studio 2005 or RAD Studio 2007 for C++. If you use these environments please contact us to let us know that they are important to you.

.NET

Users have asked us if we will support Delphi Prism. In the short term, no. We supported Visual Studio 2003 with C# and Visual Basic.NET and we fully understand what is required. Much of the IntraWeb code is in designers and would require a massive porting effort and maintenance of a large amount of forked code.

In the mid to long term we are investigating some new routes and possibilities with .NET, however it is too early to speak about this.