It mentions Delphi 8, which is in effect Delphi .Net.
It's basically a marriage of Delphi with the power of
.Net. I personally don't like the corruption that it's
done (My files are now huge .NET encompassed crap
instead of nice small Delphi code) but that could have
been my stupidity in 8 versus 7.
There's also no secret that one of the main guys that
helped make Delphi also went on to help facilitate C# at
Microsoft. Delphi and C# have a lot of similarities.
It's almost eerie how similar they are and if you didn't
figure that the prominent person did both, then you
would think it's some fluke in nature but it isn't. C#
draws heavily on a lot of what made Delphi such a cool
language.
I'm slowly transitioning away from Delphi though I still
love the fact that in version 7 my apps are
significantly smaller than .NET's 20mb+ Runtime files. A
MFC app generated by the AppWizard with 0 code would get
compile to a statically linked file of about 2mb. A
Delphi app with no code and just a window, mimicing the
same MFC app would get me about 800k. Delphi won my vote
with the only other language with smaller footprints
being assembly, and I'm not about to go there (though I
did try)
Version 8 is a whole other story. It is this marriage of
.NET that I can't seem to break free from. Plus it uses
1.0 of the Framework and won't work with 1.1 at least
the version 8 I used. They may have a service pack to
'upgrade' but I highly doubt it. Delphi has turned into
this beast that I'm not really looking forward to
taming, plus it's a good idea to jump into C# now while
I can. The transition is incredibly easy mainly because
of the many similarities between Delphi/Pascal and C#.