Statements towards VCL.NET support in future LMD products
December 5, 2003As you might know the upcoming Delphi for .NET will support NET Framework only. In following statements we want to clarify several points regarding future LMD products:
Will LMD Innovative support Borland’s new component framework (VCL.NET)? Yes. We expect to release VCL.NET versions of all our packages (including LMD ElPack) in the first half of 2004.
Will VCL.NET version of your packages a free upgrade? No. We will try our best to make porting applications (using LMD products) to VCL.NET as simple as possible. However for component developers much more effort is required to port a WIN32 VCL based component suite to a VCL.NET one. Bundle offers for VCL/VCL.NET packages will be available in 1st quarter 2004. Customers who recently purchased a current package or upgrade (or plan to do so now) will have no disadvantage (they have to pay only difference amount). The ports to VCL.NET will be based on current releases (LMD-Tools 7 and LMD ElPack 4).
Will the update for next Win32 based Delphi be free? If there will be a new Delphi Win32 in 2004: yes (for all 2003 versions of our packages, LMD-Tools 7 and ElPack 4). Otherwise: It depends…
Will LMD Innovative drop WIN32 support? No! Though it looks like that supporting .NET will be the future for Windows programmers, there are still plenty of situations where creating an application based on .NET framework makes no sense (e.g. desktop applications which should still support Win9X). So there will be definitely at least one future major release for both LMD-Tools and LMD ElPack.