This is not a rethorical question. And not because now Delphi targets OSX, iOS or Android, and it applies to those writing Delphi applications that runs on Windows only. There's a real difference, and it's important to understand it especially now the usual lame BorInCodeDero marketing is trying to use the end of Windows XP support to sell Delphi upgrades. But is Delphi today a real Windows development tool? My answer is no.

Michael Swindell just blogged this: The Walking Dead Season Premiere: Starring Delphi - did he understand that TV show is about Zombies? Yes, probably the right place for Delphi... and its average developer LOL!

Oh, there's also a book about OS/2 Warp... but that got buried, eventually...

Today François Piette has written about "Path issue when having installed a lot of software": Windows is having some trouble with very long path environment variable, even in Windows 7. This is true.

In his post Blackberry is Still Ahead of Microsoft, Jim McKeeth uses US numbers only to try to demonstrate that Embarcadero should never support Windows Phone, up to the point to say that Blackberry is ahead of it.

Many developers learnt first to code on isolated machines - DOS ones if they are old enough - or within simple networks. DOS was a single process, single thread environment, almost always on isolated machines. Maybe a modem to connect to a BBS, LAN were much rarer. That meant developers had little to care about "the environment" their application where "living in". Once the application was started, it was the only one running (but some tricks like TSR) and could use all the resources available. Slowly, the environment changed.

If you try to post a comment to Jim McKeeth The Podcast at Delphi.org  blog while you're behind a company proxy, you get this error:

Your comment has been blocked because the blog owner has set their spam filter to not allow comments from users behind proxies.

The latest release of MSDN online no longer lists unsupported operating systems in the "Requirements" section, "Minimum supported client" (or server). Now the "minimums" are XP and 2003. 2000, NT and 9x are gone, even if that API is supported by those versions. If someone needs to write software for those systems and needs to know which supports what, it's better he keeps an older MSDN help file around.

And there are some funny changes (highlighting is mine):

The first beta release of Message Compiler Editor 3 is available here. The main new feature is the support of Unicode message files (version 2.x was still compiled with Delphi 2007). Importing already existing message files is planned for this release but not available yet due to some bugs still needing to be fixed in the parser.

The UI has been switched to ribbons, more to work a little with Delphi implementation of them (I use Developer Express ExpressBars for my commercial applications) than for a real need.

It looks my efforts to convince BorCodeDero to design a sound security model into Datasnap are doomed to fail. The main reason is it looks only me is worried about the actual fake secutity model. Known speakers and writers about Delphi look totally unaware about sound security. Look at this post by Bob Swart.

Many "news" about the imminent death of PC are appearing around despite its 30th birthday, replaced by smartphones and tablets. What's true in that? Let's look for a moment at the past history, and the personal computer revolutions. Before that there was centralized systems from which you could rent some processing time and highly proprietary systems using software paid yearly  (clouds, anyone?), and consumer electronics were made by highly specialized devices that could usually only consume proprietary contents.