Eugene Starostin

Please, don’t let us make your favorite IDE unsupported!

Today I have to address you with a couple of questions important to all of us. The background is as follows…

Currently we are working on new major releases and minor updates of our frameworks and tools. Just yesterday, an intense debate sparked among our team over whether we should continue to support some aged IDEs, e.g. Visual Studio 2005 and Delphi 5. In the heat of the moment, some hotheads even remembered Visual Studio 2010 and Delphi XE3. “Okay, Okay”, I said. “Let us not make such decision ourselves, let’s ask our customers. They know better what they actually need!” So…

Don’t let us discontinue support for your favorite IDE!

We’ve prepared a quick survey with just a few questions. Believe me, this will take a very little of your time, but will allow us to retain the support for the IDEs you use and love.

It goes without saying that we will continue to support the recent versions of Visual Studio (2013, 2012 and 2010) as well as Delphi (XE5XE2). We just want to know whether you need support for the old versions.  

Updated on 12-Dec-2013: First off, a huge thank you to everyone who took a minute to participate in this quick survey.  The survey is closed and you can see the results below.

[yop_poll id=”3″]

Survey results: What IDEs will not be supported

I think I am ready to tell you about our further steps right now…

  1. Visual Studio 2005 will no longer be supported only in the next major generation of our products. This will happen when the first beta of the next Office or Visual Studio comes out.
  2. Delphi 5 and 6 will stop to be supported starting from 2014.
  3. Beginning with 2015, we will support Delphi starting from the XE version.
  4. ActiveX edition of Outlook Security Manager stays in production.
  5. Please remember all these plans of ours…

Note. All Premium subscribers can request a special build with support for older versions of Visual Studio or Delphi. Please note that the default Premium setup packages will not include those old IDEs, we will provide special builds on request only.

If you have any other versions, suggestions or ideas, please do write to me directly or leave a comment on this page. Any criticism is most welcome too! Thank you for your smiles and feedback! :)

32 Comments

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    Delphi 7? Delphi XE?

    Guys, don’t you need support for Office x64?!

  • Avi says:

    What about VS 2012?
    What about 64Bit support?

  • B Jansen says:

    Since Embarcadero is pushing every developer to a subscription I would say there is no need to keep supporting old IDE’s and miss out on the new language features with the newer Delphi versions.

    For me it’s OK if you drop all but the latest 2-3 releases of any IDE / Language.

  • B Jansen says:

    And please don’t use Gravatar! I thought my reaction was sort of anonymous and now I see my picture! So my e-mail address is not published but it is used to look up my picture :-)

  • David Heffernan says:

    Your voting form is broken. I need x64 support and so for me you only need to support XE2 and later. I would be very happy for you to drop support for all older versions. Which means I’d like to vote but select no checkboxes. But the form won’t let me do that.

    Why won’t you let my voice be heard?

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    David,

    Of course, we will continue to support XE2 – XE5 and VS 2010 – VS 2013, it goes without saying. I was asking only about aged IDEs. I’m going to add this to the post right now :)

  • Mark Frerichs says:

    Guys, x64 support is a must since most of all installed Office and OS platforms are x64.

    I would not drop VS 2008 yet. There would be a lot od developers that would need to convert their projects (including me) and the conversion is not always seamless.

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    B Jansen,

    As for Gravatar, if we do this, it would stop working for all. Let me some time to think it over, please :) Thank you for your feedback!

  • Viktar Varvanovich (Add-in Express Team) says:

    Hi B Jansen,

    I’ve found a way to remove your gravatar ;)

  • Doug Little says:

    I only use VS 2010 – soon going to VS 2012.
    I dont much care about 64 Bit office apps – Even MS does not even recommend it.

  • Stefan Schultze says:

    We always use the latest Visual Studio version, BUT we have to use .NET Framework 3.5. So I don’t know which check boxes to tick.

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    Stefan,

    Judging by the current results, I’d choose “Bring Bill Gates back!” :)

  • David Ching says:

    VS 2010+ is fine with me. VS 2010 is required because there is no support for deployment projects after that. I still target .NET 2.0 because .NET 4 does not come with Windows 7, which is still very widely used.

  • Dennis Wallentin says:

    As for Visual Studio the big news are few for every new version Microsoft launch. For every new version it takes more time for it to penetrate the market. In other words, developers don’t see the need to always update to the latest version.

    Practically it means that there will be more versions in use nowadays then in the past. Therefore the need to support more versions will increase. I believe that 2010, 2012 and 2013 will be alive longer than for instance 2005 and 2008.

    Actually, this is identical to the MS Office market. Version 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013 are all still in use. Perhaps 2003 can be dropped when next version is shipped.

    The x64 version of MS Excel is not widely used. Simple because there are no particular needs for it. So I don’t expect the demand for it will increase within the foreseeable future. But in the long run the whole industry will move to the x64 platform.

    That’s all for now.

    All the best,
    Dennis

  • David says:

    Your form does not let us vote for ‘none of the above’ so the only way of voting is for ‘what is delphi’ or ‘bring back bill gates’.
    Two versions of Visual Studion are fine for me (2010/2012)

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    Dennis,

    Welcome back! :) As usually, your response is very comprehensive, competent and important for us.

    So far, we will certainly need to keep supporting VS 2008 and Delphi XE (the latter is a surprise for me). As for other versions of Visual Studio and Delphi, we will give it some more thought…

    Thank you for sharing your opinion!

  • Svetlana Cheusheva (Add-in Express Team) says:

    Hi David,

    We’ve added “None of the above” choice. Thank you for the idea!

  • Tim McKay says:

    For us, we have a plug in that a number of our VS 2008 projects rely upon. The upgrade path is long and unpopular (ie to a newer version of VS), since the 3rd part components are no longer maintained.

    All our new dev is in XE5 and we’re slowly migrating internal projects over. Client projects could take years. At some point when they upgrade to Office 2025 we may greenlight legacy code conversion but it will be a while.

  • Graydon Britton says:

    Visual Studio 12. Excel 2013. Office 64Bit. Thanks :)

  • Eric Legault says:

    Keep VS 2008! I still have old projects that I need to support and migrating to VS 2010 + or greater is a challenge (time and resources).

  • Dennis Wallentin says:

    I *assume* x64 will be supported in the same way as with x86. Sooner or later x64 will be the de facto standard so therefore it’s a must to support x64.

  • Mike McGavin says:

    For what it’s worth I agree with David Ching’s comment that VS2010 is still important due to the deployment project issue. I can’t see any IDEs on the list which it’d be worth keeping for ourselves, at least. We’d love to be away from Visual Studio setup projects and all their problems, and we’re getting there. With so many small projects, though, each with their own annoyances and things to learn and some of which are only revisited infrequently if a customer wants a small change, the migration to an alternative Setup framework is a timely process.

    We still, sadly, have a significant number of (mostly government) clients running Windows XP! For server-side dev we’d not care about the framework, but our ADX-based products are mostly client side, and for that we normally target .Net 3.5 at most. It’s sometimes difficult to convince sysadmins to push out a major DotNet framework upgrade onto their trusty ancient desktop image, multipled hundreds or thousands of times.

  • David Heffernan says:

    You don’t understand. I want to cast a vote with no boxes checked and cannot.

  • Rex Chan says:

    For delphi, at least support delphi 2009 due to it supports unicode code.
    For vs.net, at least support vs.net 2008 (My preference only).

    Thanks,
    keep on going.

  • Jerald Mock says:

    We currently use VS2010 for development and we have used for years the Active X Outlook Security Manager. We hope you continue to support and update this product.

    Thanks
    jmm

  • Svetlana Cheusheva (Add-in Express Team) says:

    Hi Jerald,

    Of course, we will continue to support all three editions of Security Manager: .NET, Delphi and ActiveX. Thanks for your comment!

  • Oscar Angress says:

    Hi,

    whats about Winows 8 and internet explorer 11 toolbar?

  • Dmitry Kostochko (Add-in Express Team) says:

    Hi Oscar,

    All our products already support Windows 8 and we plan to support IE 11 in the next major version of Add-in Express for Internet Explorer. The release is scheduled for December.

  • Barraclough says:

    Hi Eugene

    I am currently using vb2008, vb2010 and vb.net. Please continue supporting them as much as you can.

    Many thanks.

  • s29ers says:

    We bought from you Active X Outlook Security Manager. We can only use Active-X and Com interface via VB script so I hope you will continue to support them. Thanks again for a great product.

  • San says:

    AddinExpress for Internet Explorer and Microsoft .NET does not supports VS 2013…

  • Eugene Starostin says:

    San,

    We are going to publish the new version of Add-in Express for IE next week with support for VS 2013 and IE 11. I mentioned this in the recent newsletter. But it looks like our newsletters cannot always break through firewalls and spam filters :)

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