I worked with Delphi for several years, and it was the first IDE I used professionally. It was truly brilliant for developing Win32 and WinForms applications.

I worked with Delphi for several years, and it was the first IDE I used professionally. It was truly brilliant for developing Win32 and WinForms applications. I can honestly say that Delphi 5 was a better tool for building Windows apps than the latest versions Visual Studio, at least in terms of usability, responsiveness, and debugging. But man are you ever right about the compatibility issues! Upgrading from Delphi 5 to the (then current) Delphi 2005 was a total nightmare. Our codebase was about 600k lines, and I will never forget the trauma of trying to get it to just build in the newer version. The comparison with .NET codebases that "just work" from version to version is night and day, and sadly it's worth putting up with a laggy beast of an IDE to have that security around your projects.