I used Delphi for 5 years, and the Borland IDE also had its share of bugs just line VS does. The real strengths of Delphi were simplicity and an extreme flexibility (there were so many components provided with the IDE out of the box!). It was a framework already, allowing for the best RAD possible... until the raise of the .Net framework. Unfortunately, Borland has been killed by Microsoft a long time ago by doing the following: 1) Hire Anders Hejlsberg in 1996, the inventor of Delphi, and the architect of the .NET framework! 2) Acquire a share of Borland in 1999. Check this article: http://delphi.about.com/od/delphifornet/a/conspiracydnet\_2.htm So, Borland is certainly not in a position to compete with Microsoft anymore. An alternative is the Mono project, but I don't really know the current state of it. Did anyone try this out?