It's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for the Delphi community of late. For a long time it's been looking pretty negative but things have started looking up then back down again and it's still not clear where the future lies for Delphi. It all started going a bit wrong with the release of Delphi 8, which was a bit of a disaster. But there have been bad releases of Delphi in the past and it's recovered from them. Then Delphi 2005 came out and that was pretty horrendous too. From the newsgroups it sounded like one hell of a buggy release, never tried it myself since I haven't been doing much Delphi work for a while. The one ray of hope was Allen Bauer, who seemed to be single-handedly fixing all the bugs and releasing unofficial hotfixes. Kudos to Borland for allowing him to do it, but the question still remains why they weren't releasing them officially. Now we have Delphi 2006 and from initial reports this looks good. More stable, better performance, some features that Visual Studio doesn't have. But still there are quite a few problems for Delphi. First, the Delphi market is tiny and getting smaller (in the UK at least). Second, if you're developing in .NET, C# or VB.NET is the obvious choice of language, since almost every example on the net is in one of these languages. Delphi's trump card is the fact it still supports Win32 development. The big question is whether Win32 development has a future. But at least Borland have realised to give Delphi any chance at all they need to focus on making it the best quality product they can. If they'd continued down the road they were with Delphi 8 and 2005, Delphi wouldn't have a hope. Then recently there was more bad news as Danny Thorpe left Borland for Google. He was obviously a pretty clued-up guy, but I always like to think that nobody is indispensible. Only time will tell what effect it has. Of course one ex-Delphi person went on to create C#, which ironically has probably caused more of a problem to Delphi than his departure had on the development of Delphi...