It's rough being a Delphi programmer. We know we have a wonderful, productive environment - but jobs are few and far between. We know that we can write any sort of application with Delphi - yet Delphi is seen as a GUI builder and a database front-end. We've all seen (or at least heard of) systems where the 'interesting parts' are written in C or C++, in DLL's, and Delphi is just used for the GUI interface. We may know C++ and have significant Win32 experience - and yet not been considered for C++ jobs because we didn't know MFC.

.Net changes that. All .Net languages use the same Framework Class Library [FCL]. Learn the FCL - in any language - and you're a .Net programmer. "Learn once, work anywhere."

What split the Windows programming world into mutually incompatible Delphi shops, VB shops, and C++ shops was never the languages themselves. Picking up any particular language has always been easy. The barriers to entry have always been the different libraries. Using a different language meant learning a new library. Learning a new library meant that every little thing required a documentation search; your productivity was near zero for weeks on end. But with .Net, once you learn the Framework Classes, you can easily move from project to project and from job to job.

What's more, in this bigger, broader job market, Delphi skills are a big advantage. .Net is not a knock-off or successor to Delphi , and there are significant differences between Delphi and .Net - but .Net is a lot like Delphi. .Net has components, events, exceptions, interfaces, and objects that descend via single inheritance from a common ancestor. All just like Delphi. . Net has more in common with Delphi than it does with either MFC or VB, and so Delphi programmers will find .Net easier to learn than VB or MFC programmers will.

This book presents .Net from a Delphi programmer's viewpoint. It doesn't ask you to plow through things you already know in the hopes of picking up a few choice bits of new information; it presents the core concepts of the .Net world in terms of the Delphi concepts you're familiar with. The examples are in either C# or Delphi, not both - unless I'm trying to highlight a syntax difference.

From your employer's point of view, .Net offers managed code plus most of Delphi's traditional productivity advantages, without Delphi's traditional drawback of being a niche product that few programmers know. From your point of view, .Net offers something like a hundred times as many possible jobs - and it puts the fun back in programming. Garbage collection frees us from the tyranny of Free What You Create and all the petty discipline of avoiding memory leaks. We can write functions that return objects; we never have to worry about a "tombstoned pointer" to a prematurely freed object leading to memory corruption.

.Net is fun. .Net is productive. .Net offers what you've always loved about Delphi, without locking you into a narrow ghetto. This book will help you transfer your Delphi skills to the broader, brighter world outside the ghetto walls.