VB vs. Delphi

Hi Lyla,

I'm suprised that you haven't been stormed with opinions on this topic. I know the thread on VB vs. C++ was a real busy one.

Aside from the obvious differences, VB and Delphi are rather similar. VB is Visual "BASIC" and Delphi is Visual "PASCAL". Each has an similar type of development environment and each is great for rapid development. I think you'll find that people will be fiercly loyal to one product or another, but that is nothing new.

The big differences are in the guts of development. Even though I make my living doing VB Programming, I think that Delphi is a superior development tool. Here are my reasons... Delphi apps are truely compiled executibles and require no Run-time files. Most of the controls you add to a Delphi app are compiled right into the EXE which eliminates the distribution of various OCX files and DLLs.
Delphi is also truely Object Oriented and supports all the features of OOP like inheritance, etc, whereas VB doesn't. VB only supports interface inheritance.

The BDE that comes with Delphi isn't worth the disk space it takes so I don't even have it installed. Instead, I stick with Microsoft ADO. You can find any number of Free or very inexpensive add-ins for using ADO in Delphi. One other thing I like about Delphi is the huge number of Third party development tools. I know that VB has a ton of them too, but a good share of the Delphi tools come with the SOURCE CODE for the tool. I don't know of any VB tools that do that.

I might sound like I'm being hard on VB. Perhaps it's because I just spent the last 24 hours in DLL HELL. We use VB5 and 6 at the office for development. The 2 don't really mix. We need VB5 for Winframe development (Winframe doesn't support VB6). When our latest Help Desk Software was installed it replaced some of the VB5 DLLs and OCX files with the latest VB6 DLLs and OCX files. Suddenly, all of my VB5 development went to hell in a hand basket. The Common Dialog, Toolbars, and RichText Box controls were all replace with Picture Boxes since it could find the right version of the control to use. I got it all fixed, but it was a pain in the ass.

With all of that bitching out of the way... VB is great for rapid development and is relativly easy to learn. The bottom line is this... VB is more common in the market place right now so you do what will earn you a living. I hope VB and Delphi continue to compete so both products strive to be better.