Borland Developer Studio 2006

Borland publicly and officially admits that a product is coming.  Discussions about the beta were all “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” up to this point.  Generally this means a press release, and the official announcement of the product name.  In this case, the new product name is “Borland Developer Studio 2006“, but it looks likes they will actually be selling the same thing under three different labels: Delphi, C#Builder, and C++Builder“  Each product will contain all four compilers (Delphi for .Net, Delphi for Win32, C#Builder, and C++Builder).

Launched - This is the first official, public showing of the product.  It usually occurs at a big event or conference.  It's a good bet that BDS 2006 will be “launched” at DevCon this year.  Usually, at the this point, Borland starts taking advanced orders for the product.  At this point, the product is not quite completed yet, though it usually is in the very late stages of development.

Release to Manufacturing - This means that the product is actually completed and shipped to manufacturing.  We don't usually hear about this specific date, but obviously it happens, because soon after, the product starts shipping, and boxes start showing up on people's door steps.

Key features appear to be:

• CodeRush like “Live Templates“ that complete themselves as you type.  This will be a very nice feature.  I'm hoping for the ability to select a chunk of code and automatically wrap a   tag around it.

• “Snap Guides“ for aligning things in the VCL designer.  That will be nice.  I remember using those quite a bit in NetObjects Fusion, and really liking them.  I'd like to see that in the ASP.NET designer.  Well, actually, no I wouldn't.  I do FlowLayout, so I don't need them.

• C++Builder -- I won't be installing this at all, but I know that there will be a lot of happy C++ developers that will.

• ECO III -- I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't yet “gotten in“ to ECO, so I can't speak for what the new features here are, but I do know that ECO rocks, and so ECO III can only rock more than ECO II, right?  Of course, these guys are  moving so fast on this stuff that I may never be able to catch up.

• BDP Connection Pooling -- nice, and very much needed.

• According the the Borland folks on the newsgroups, the Together integration with Delphi should be complete.  We should have full model support going both ways with our code.  Very sweet.  Plus all the refactoring support.  Double Sweet.

Anyway, should be fun to see.  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it