OK, so I've just discovered that Embarcadero offers a Delphi Starter Edition that's similar to Microsoft's Express offering... although the licencing on it is a little whacked... you can use the SE until your annual revenue from products produced by it exceed $1000 ... I'm guessing it's on the honor system, as I don't see anything in the website that says just how that works.

Anyways, of course as part of the marketing campaign, it tries to up-sell you on the next level up, the Professional edition... some of the features of Pro are nice... but one stood out... according to the Starter Edition FAQ with the Professional Edition comes
dbExpress local database connectivity to MySQL
Okaaaay... so what does that mean? Does that mean with the Starter Edition I DON'T get connectivity to local MySQL Databases? Or what? Naturally searching their website for "dbexpress" turns up a lot of useless results that I couldn't make heads or tails out of.

So I'm hoping someone here can explain to me just what that means. If I can't use the SE to talk to a MySQL database, I'm going to pass and revert back to .NET... but I have the perfect opportunity project to give something new a try (although it will be going back to my roots as my first real development was with Pascal). But it's only viable if I can talk to a database. Or is dbExpress kind of like the Data Explorer in VS? A tool that makes connections and data access simplier? If I can code it manually, then there isn't an issue.

-tg