Delphi To C#

I find I am at a crossroads.  I have over 20 years of Delphi development experience.  Despite Embarcadero’s best effort, Delphi is slipping as far as popularity and to stay in the game I need to diversify.  I have been looking at C#.  It certainly has a number of things going for it.  So I have started moving from Delphi to C#. Learning a new language can be a bit daunting though when you have been stuck to one for so long.  But persistence and determination will pay off.

Been exploring for a couple of months and like what I see:

• C# is object oriented.
• C# has all of the reflection and run time type information and more that Delphi has.
• Data binding in C# is far superior and easier to use, although I am still back with Delphi XE4 with that.  There is no having to create special adapters and treat them like a dataset.
• The philosophy behind C# appears in some ways familiar to a Delphi programmer (not surprising give the history behind it).  For example the way the interfaces are declared and implemented in classes.
• C# has drag and drop UI design capabilities that are not a lot unlike that of Delphi.
• The community edition of visual studio only a download away it.  This is very attractive for a single professional developer.
• Very large on line community presence of C# and .net .
• Extensive documentation at least on line.
• The availability of the Mono project for development of Linux and Mac OSX applications.
• Along with Mono is the availability of Xamarin for mobile applications.
• There is a significant amount of third party and open source libraries and frameworks.
• The ability to implement design patterns are well supported.

The more I play with C# the more comfortable I am with.  I’ll talk a bit more of my learning and transition from Delphi to C# as time goes on in the hope someone may find it helpful and interesting.