On The Other Hand…

Bitwise Technical Editor, Dermot Hogan, is a long-time user of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We asked him to take a look at the Borland Developer Studio to see if he might be tempted to make the switch…

See also: The Bitwise review of Borland Developer Studio 2006

My first impression on opening the Borland Developer Studio 2006 was how similar it looked to Visual Studio. I had no problem in finding my way around and apart from the Tools window being located in the bottom right hand corner, everything seemed pretty familiar – the menu structures were similar and the operations by which you create and build a project were also pretty much the same – sort of expected really, since both Visual Studio and Developer Studio do the same sort of thing.

To start off with I created a new C# project and got a “hello world” button up and running in a few minutes. Since Developer Studio uses the same C# compiler as Microsoft (i.e. Microsoft’s), there were few differences. But I did notice that the IntelliSense information was slightly different. For example, when used on a button method, Developer Studio included some base class interfaces that weren’t visible in Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list. The big difference, though, was the absence of Edit-and-Continue – the ability to make a smallish change to C#, C++ or Visual Basic code in Visual Studio and to continue from where you are debugging. For me, this makes a big difference in the speed at which I can debug stuff: I use Edit-and-continue all the time.

On a plus note, I thought that Developer Studio’s Find and Replace menus and dialogs were superior to Visual Studio’s. For some reason, I’ve never got on with the Visual Studio Find  - though I note that it’s been improved in the new version. But to my taste, the Developer Studio version is still clearer and simpler. Also, at last the Developer Studio debugger is as good as the Visual Studio equivalent (a big improvement over Borland's previous version).

The number of tools available to a developer is smaller in Developer Studio. For example, the GUID creation tool which I find to be pretty indispensable in Visual Studio isn’t in Developer Studio – not that I could find anyway. And I do like the Visual Studio ‘Error Lookup’ tool which lets you get a textual interpretation of a Windows API error code without having to Google it. It doesn’t work every time but it’s pretty good.

As you can probably guess from the above, I do a whole load of Windows API programming. In particular, I’m hammering away at the Visual Studio ‘extensibility’ system right now. This allows you to extend Visual Studio to implement languages of your own choice – and a very neat system it is too. There isn’t anything like this in Developer Studio. OK, I’d agree that this is a pretty limited area of interest for most people, but it does really illustrate to me the amount of resources that Microsoft can throw at a product compared to Borland. It must have cost Microsoft a fair bit to build the Visual Studio COM interfaces (and yes, Visual Studio is COM based and not .NET based, as you might naively think), document them and test them.

This brings me to the core of my Visual Studio problem. To do COM, I’ve found it best to use C++. Microsoft claims that you can use C#. Well, yes, you can – but let’s say that, when you do so, you can 'see the join'. In one project I’m working on, I’ve got half of it written in C++ and the other half written in C#. I won’t mention Visual Basic – my blood pressure tends to rise to extreme levels when thinking about it. I don’t have too much a problem switching between C# and C++, but on occasion I have found myself trying to use something in C++ which only works in C# and vice versa.

Compare and contrast the Borland Developer Studio. If you need to write a COM application, you use Pascal. And if you want to write a managed .NET application – hmmm, you use Pascal. Now that’s an elegant idea! I wonder why Microsoft with its whole raft of J#, C#, Visual Basic and C++ never thought of that?

Overall, I think that Visual Studio is a better environment than Developer Studio. It’s extensible, has Edit-and-Continue and more tools and templates. From what I’ve seen so far, even though it is perfectly respectable and will do the job, I’m not tempted to switch to Developer Studio. The chief benefit of the Borland product is that it has a language – Pascal - with which you can tackle both .NET and COM/Win32 applications. If that’s important – and it is for some people upgrading from Visual Basic 6 - then Developer Studio could be the answer.

January 2006