So we have a new front-end applet to build (the target audience is in-house staff only), and my client has been recently enthused by the visual look of stuff hes seen elsewhere (in particular, a couple of apps that I know were written in WPF). Im not adverse to doing something in WPF myself, having dabbled with it elsewhere*, but pretty much all of his current codebase is Delphi 2007/XE2, and I feel like Im creating new problems for him if I suddenly bring C# into the mix. He wouldnt care much right now, but he might care in 6 months time if I move on somewhere else and hes got a real mixed-bag of stuff to find support for. Hes stuck on XE2, moving to a newer version is not an option for him for the time being. I did wonder about trying to build something in FireMonkey, but I dont know whether its already moved on so much since XE2 that anything we do will be largely broken/wrong if we tried to move up to a newer version later. Do people build desktop apps in FireMonkey? This would be a half dozen basic forms (one with a lot of text entry fields), one or 2 listview/datagrid forms, a couple of reports and a SQL Server Express back end... I also wondered about just trying to make more of an effort with VCL themes and stretching the 3rd party components we already have (we have a reasonable amount of DevExpress and TMS stuff here) to try and make things look a little more modern. We have component sets kicking around that Ive barely looked at to be honest, but I dont recall ever seeing any demos where it didnt look like they were trying a bit too hard, if you see what I mean. He particularly likes big, smooth labels, flat grids and lack of XP type chrome. He doesnt want it to look like a phone app, but he thinks our existing Delphi stuff looks quite old now and he wants the new program to look modern. Hes probably planning to look for investors or something soon, who knows? :-) Any thoughts, suggestions or destructive cynicism much appreciated. :-) *fatal, I know
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 10:11:58 +0000
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