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Fatih Barut

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Immigration from Delphi to C# .Net, possible? logical? doable?

Hi all,
I fell in love with Delphi 15 years ago, spent days and nights, nights and days, finished great projects with high complexity with it.
However, today's industry standard is web browser based C# .Net applications (even though I  avoided confrontation for years) and when you say to a company or a governmental organisation that you want to write their program with Delphi they look you as you are a vampire. And I lost at least 2 big (really big) projects because of this.

Sum it up, what do you think?
After age of 40, spending 15 years with Delphi and having all the licenses you need (Delphi, Devexpress VCL, Unidac and FastReport) is it logical to immigrate from Delphi to C# .Net

Any idea or shared experience will be really appreciated.

Thank you.
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David Johnson, CD
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I don't know if Delphi can create .dll's if yes, then you can import the dll into your c# project
If your question is about nessesary to learn C# despite the fact that you are good Delphi  programmer, yes. It is good idea, because there are not enough projects with Delphi  now.
If you ask about convertion Delphi projects to C# projects, there is article about this problem:
http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/32338
I'm at a similar age, and I've gotten pretty comfortable with several languages that I rarely ever use anymore (Perl, Miva, CF, classic VB, etc). Some of them are better than others, but unfortunately, the problem is NOT whether or not a language is good.

While you might be able to build something great in Delphi, the customer has to figure out how the code will be maintained in the future. They cannot assume that you will always be there for them unless you are a larger corporation like BAH that has a zillion employees to replace any employee that decides to retire some day or gets hit by a bolt of lightning.

If it's built in Delphi, then the customer has to assume the risk that they might have to maintain it, which means they need Delphi developers. These days, there's an influx of developers who are only taught the latest languages - usually C# and/or Java, so the number of Delphi developers continues to drop, which means a high risk to the customer if they take on a Delphi application.

So if you want to continue to win contracts, then yes, you should be learning C# and Java. You'll likely continue to have maintenance projects for Delphi, so it's not like you're just giving up on that language, but newer projects will likely have a better chance of succeeding if you build them in C# or Java. Luckily, the C# and Java languages are syntactically similar. In fact, C#, Java, Javascript, and PHP are all very syntactically similar, which makes it easier to learn another one of those languages once you learn the first one.
C# ?
isn't that deprecated yet?

i'm an somewhat same age delphi dev. You can make anything with Delphi.  Even a webserver.
But have to agree, finding young Delphi devs is a challenge.  Way easier to find devs for angular, drupal, joomla or whatever framework pops up to build websites.

Depends how big, but having a framework to build upong is an easier start.
About ages :-)
I'm (more than) few years over 40. And still using Delphi. Shame on me, still on D6 but works on Win10!!.
But, my problem is:
- find time to convert code to newer version (very large projects)
- find younger dev. to continue what I'm starting before many years...
- find time to answer EE questions :-)
....

C# or Delphi? Created by same person anyway....

Think that there is no better language to learn, but which can solve faster/better some task.
I thing that dev need to know few of them and use it by demand.

For desktop and/or database app - Delphi is a Top.
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Fatih Barut

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the thing is "the problem is not our thoughts about delphi /C#" the problem is the steriotypes and thinks of the customers who will pay you...
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Fatih Barut

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Please accept all comments that were helpful as the answer.
thanks for your time to give your opinion
Hi Faith,

It's important that you properly mark the comments that helped you. Please do not mark your own comment as the only answer.
I had marked one of the answers as helpful because it was really was. And now I marked yours too.