I'm a bit late getting into my own thread here; I got distracted off
on another project. How do I like .NET? I think it's great and
I'll be surprised if it doesn't flourish. I've been coding
miscellaneous projects in it for the past six months or so. It's a
pretty steep learning curve, but I've been pleased with everything
I've seen. It's a vastly more sophisticated environment than Win32
and I think as this is more widely understood, it will become the
preferred environment rather than the reluctant move. The same sort
of things that attracted us to Delphi ten years ago (exceptions,
rtti, a nice object model, etc.) will attract us to .NET now (an
even better object model, better rtti, garbage collection, better
multi-threading, etc.) Our customers won't necessarily ask for it,
we'll just be more productive in it.

I hadn't considered the idea of just making calls from .NET back
into a Win32 dll to get my IBO access, and that may work well for me
as a stop-gap. But I think the real question is whether IBO is
content to forever be a Win32 thing. I think Win32 will attract
very few new programmers from here on out; neither Microsoft nor
DevCo are likely to promote it and everyone who buys a development
tool from now on will automatically get a .NET tool and will be
likely to use it eventually.

One of the reasons Delphi thrived was because it made Windows
development much easier than the competition. The VCL supported the
developer far better than the Win32 API and far better than either
VB or VC++ did at the time. The Delphi guys had several years to
look at the Windows API and figure out how to wrap it up to the
greatest effect. I think .NET caught them flat-footed; they were
scrambling just to make .NET programming possible instead of making
it easier. But the good news is that even with all of the
advantages and sophistication of .NET, it seems Microsoft has still
failed at making it RAD, and I think this leaves great opportunity
for DevCo and for IBO. ADO.NET and even BDP.NET do not seem to be
very rich or highly optimized environments and leave a lot of room
for a product like IBO to flourish.

So, yes, I think .NET is the future. I think IBO is worth taking
into the future, and I think there is or will be money to support it
when it gets there.