The venerable Delphi has had a rough couple of years. After being virtually abandoned by Borland early last year, it was resurrected in a spin-off company called CodeGear. Now it is in the unenviable position of playing catch-up in both.NET and Win32.
Highlander, which is scheduled for a late 2007 release, will include support for ASP.NET 2.0. On the Windows-side, it will also have a .NET compatible version of the VCL. According to the roadmap, "VCL developers will be able to easily migrate code to managed code using VCL.NET."
Also included is a DBX4 driver for ADO.NET and a lightweight database called SQLDatastore. SQLDatastore is written completely in managed code, fully supports transactions, and allows stored procedures to be written in any language.
The next edition of Delphi, slated for early 2008, is Tiburón. In this release the Win32 version of Delphi is expected to be fully Unicode-compatible with even the standard string being in Unicode format. This also includes the VCL toolkit.
Parameterized types are also going to be part of Tiburón for both the Win32 and .NET platforms. How they expect the Highlander release to support .NET 2.0 generics when the language will not until Tiburón has not been specified.
The last named version of Delphi on the roadmap is Commodore. This version, to be released in the winter of 2008, will focus on 64-bit development.
Not mentioned is anything about supporting .NET 3.0 or 3.5. Considering the work load in front of the Delphi team, we may not see anything in that area until 2009.