Another blast from the past. I’ve been using many development environment all my live, so I have been using .NET very early on allowing me to make a good comparison: [WayBack] Delphi developer switching to C# – Stack Overflow.
I have a broad toolbox because we’ve never lived in a “silver bullet” era: any problem needs a combination of tools to solve them. Having a broad toolset allows you to pick and choose more easily. Mastering the different tools however requires a lot of effort and time. You really need to love this profession to put that energy in it.
I heavily use both for software development.
Development speed of server apps (web apps, web services, windows services) is much higher in .NET.
Development speed of business apps (pure Windows UI) is much higher in Delphi.
Development of sexy apps is a pain in both environments.
A few things you should know:
- Learning the .NET framework will take a lot of time: it is huge, but contains a lot of gizmos (some gems are really well hidden).
- Don’t lose yourself in following all new trends at once: generics, lambda, LINQ, each are nice, but grasping them all at once is only for a few of us
- For web apps, skip WebForms, but learn ASP.NET MVVC (yes, the Ruby guys were right after all); learn HTML 5 and JavaScript too.
- For sexy Windows apps, learn WPF, but be prepared for a steep learning curve (designer, and framework are radically different)
- Don’t get a too sexy UI: it costs you a disproportional amount of time while your users are waiting for functionality
- Like the market has been bashing Delphi since version 1, the market is bashing SilverLight too
- Skip WinForms; if you need something like WinForms, then Delphi is way more productive (even more so if you have an existing Delphi VCL codebase).
- WPF is just as thread-friendly as the VCL or WinForms (read: neither of the 3 is thread friendly)
- Don’t perform rewrites of your Delphi stuff in .NET (or for that matter any other 1:1 rewrite from platform A into platform B): it is a waste of your time.
- Threading and synchronization are a pain in all development environments. The pain is not so much in the general stuff (the Concurrent Collections in the .NET 4 framework helps, as do the Delphi OmniThreadLibrary), but in getting the final details and exception cases right is the real pain.
- Garbage collection does not mean that you won’t leak memory: it means that you won’t leak when your app terminates, but while it runs the leaks are way harder to detect (boy, I wish I had the FastMM memory monitor for .NET)
–jeroen