Yesterday, Nick Hodges was our guest at the SDN Software Developer Event in The Netherlands. In his first session, he presented the news around CodeGear ("Where Developers Matter"), and the Delphi Roadmap - showing some things that may not have been public knowledge.
According to the Delphi Roadmap that Nick showed, Delphi Highlander is scheduled for release in the first half of 2007 (around the half of the first half of 2007). Delphi Highlander will support
Win32 as well as .NET 2.0 (and will be able to use .NET 3.0 assemblies as well, but not the
design-time stuff). Around the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, the Delphi release after Delphi Highlander can be expected. This version used to have the "Delphi Vista" name associated with it, but in the Delphi Roadmap I saw yesterday, there was also the word "
Unicode" written next to it in big letters. So a Delphi Vista/
Unicode for the end of 2007/beginning of 2008. According to Nick,
Unicode support was received to be more important than Compact Framework support (the recent Delphi Survey also helped in confirming this), so Compact Framework support will be delayed (again). Finally, a native Win64 version of Delphi was put somewhere in the 2008 timeframe.
Personally, I'm happy about the prospect of having a
Unicode version of Delphi around this time next year. Of course,
Unicode means that applications will no longer run on Windows 95 or 98, but I hope that by the end of next year that won't be a real problem.
If you have your own wishes, and want to make sure your voice is heard, then make sure to enter the Delphi Survey. The feedback is put to good use, so don't waste the opportunity!