I own a software development company. We develop software for other companies who brand under their name/titles. And we also have a couple self branded titles in the Accounting/ERP market. Our accounting software is roughly 60% of our business and written in C++ Builder.
Those who know, realize C++ Builder has had a very rocky road in changing hands from Borland, to CodeGear, to Embarcadero and possibly a few times in between. C++ Builder has screwed us a number of times on our accounting software. The QuickReports was notoriously buggy, Their XML build description is not tightly coupled to the GUI causing builds to not work — generally buggy interface.
Over the past 8 years we’ve steadily made inroads to remove our reliance on the VCL and buggy components however, some 3rd party VCL components are just not easily replaceable still. We use a GRID package from Developer Express – great product.
I’m just about at a crossroads and with the latest version of C++ Builder XE on the market I’m having a hard time justifying the price when you look at the crappy history of this product.
So I’m looking for advice or steps anyone else followed who might be in similar situation and successfully made the switch to Visual Studio.
We’ve slowly moved most of our application to wxWidgets except for the Developer Express tools. And we’ve written our own TSQL abstraction we can port as well.
Any thoughts or suggestions? Have you moved your project to Visual Studio or have you played around with the new Builder XE to find many of its previous shortcomings now gone?
Looking for “been there, done that” advice.
Moving to wxWidgets has its advantages one of them being that you will not be bound to an IDE like C++Builder or Visual Studio. C++ Builder has had several problems, its main strength being the VCL framework, which in my oppinion is still among the best GUI frameworks around for C++. The problem ofcourse being that it requires C++ Builder, which to put it mildly does have some problems with stability and compiler performance.
However Visual Studio is not the ultimate IDE, the latest version is at best buggy, and many of the RAD tools you’re given by C++ Builder simply do not exist in Visual C++ (unless you are willing to go for the .net languages).
I can perfectly well understand your wish to make your code less dependant on C++ Builder, to tell you the truth I kind of doubt it will continue to be around for long myself. However from what it sounds like in your post, most of your development really relies on rapid developed applications, and in the C++ universe C++ Builder is one of the best tools around for this particular requirement.
Personally I never really thought of C++ as the best solution for Rapid Developed Windows GUI Applications, perhaps your focus shouldn’t be on finding a different IDE, but on finding a more appropriate language, I would suggest Delphi, by using Delphi you will be able to compile you’re existing c++ builder projects, and even reuse your existing VCL components.
Delphi will – I trust – be around for longer than C++ Builder, either in the form of Delphi, or in the form of Lazarus (IDE for freepascal) which is even cross platform and gives support for 64 bit development.
If however a change of language is not an option, I would stick with C++ Builder for now, but not upgrading to the XE version, which I simply do not think is justified by the price tag. (Given ofcourse you already work on a relatively new version).