Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

Apparently, CodeGear, a department of Embarcadero, has chosen Black Friday as release date for the all new .NET edition of Delphi:

Delphi Prism

Delphi  Prism is basically a plugin for Visual Studio, which delivers the Pascal Language plus some exciting extra features to Microsoft’s .NET development platform.

Get a trial version from CodeGear’s Code Central. Delphi Prism is part of RAD Studio 2009,  the ISO (1.4 GB!) offered for download on that page contains Prism only though.

Prism has to be activated by a license key. You can request a 14 day trial license on the same page and/or use a purchased RAD Studio 2009 license key. In other words the ISO contains the full product.

The Prism product page does not yet have a “purchase” link, but the marketing department is currently working on getting an announcement e-mail blown out. I guess that the purchase link will be activated while that happens. As the ISO contains the full product, you can switch from trial to full after the 14 days, just by entering a new license key.

Technical Information

Prism is not an upgrade of what you may know as Delphi.NET from RAD Studio 2007 or earlier. Prism is a complete new tool. It has been developed by a partner of CodeGear’s, RemObjects and comes as the solution for .NET and Mono in RAD Studio 2009. It completely “integrates” with the .NET framework. It does not bring any “Delphi Win32” dependencies. This means all executables/assemblies you will create with Prism will be “pure” .NET (or Mono) ones. No more P/invoke weirdness.

Porting Delphi Applications

The good news are: Prism Pascal is very compatible to Delphi Native Pascal. There are a couple of differences, which are well documented.

The bad news are: There is no VCL on Delphi Prism. In other words you can port business code more or less easily, but you have to re-implement your GUI code. After all I don’t think that’s  too bad though. You have all .NET possibilities instead. System.Windows.Forms, WPF, Silverlight …

If you want to dig into the technical details, then have a look at the Delphi Prism Wiki. As Delphi user you might want to start with Delphi Prism syntax compared with Delphi Win32 syntax.

More information to come (including German Prism Workshop in Darmstadt) …

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 17:23 and is filed under .NET, Delphi, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.