No sooner had I reported that here on the blog than the Delphi Product Manager, Nick Hodges, left a comment categorically denying this:

"The French article is totally false. We have no such plans."

Nick went on to issue a denial at greater length on his own blog.

"Apparently this article in a French technical magazine has caused a bit of a stir. I can’t read French but I am told that it says that we are going to move Delphi to be a plugin to Visual Studio.

Okay, I’ll be clear. This is not true. We have no such plans. We are not even contemplating such a thing. We aren’t doing it. It’s not happening. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent."

As later reported here on the Blog, the French magazine initially stood by its story. The Editor expressed full confidence that the journalist who broke the story could be relied upon. But, after representations from CodeGear, a sort of grudging retraction was eventually printed, albeit with the journalist’s comment...

“To move Delphi onto the Visual Studio platform has the same sort of logic as moving JBuilder onto the Eclipse platform. A pragmatic step dictated by market forces which would without doubt save CodeGear from possible collapse.”

End of story?

Not quite. This week, Tim Anderson (the man who, among other things, took over the PC Plus Delphi programming column, which I wrote for ten years or so, after PC Plus and I went our separate ways) spoke to CodeGear’s new CEO Jim Douglas. In an article for The Register, Anderson asked Douglas if CodeGear had given up on .NET.

Douglas replied...

“We’ve got to be more complementary rather than to duplicate what Microsoft do. We’ve got a game plan to do some things that are more complementary and additive.”

Anderson wanted to know if that might that mean a Delphi plug-in for Visual Studio? Said Douglas....

“That’s one of many approaches. I’m not going to comment specifically, but thematically you are in the right direction,” says Douglas.

Thematically in the right direction...?

What on earth does that mean? Either you move Delphi into Visual Studio (strictly speaking it would be a Visual Studio ‘package’, not a ‘plug-in’) or you don’t. I can’t see how this can be evolved into a ‘theme’ without doing one thing or the other.

Clarity, alas, is something that is in short supply from CodeGear these days...