While RAD Studio offers a great multi-device mobile and desktop development experience, Embarcadero is focused on keeping its development tools at the top spot for Windows clients development, with the best Windows client UI library, offering deep API integration. There are many technical areas VCL and FireMonkey are offering top features, and for example VCL focus on High-DPI support is significantly more powerful than what Microsoft offers at the native platform level with C++ MFC or C# WinForms.
But that’s not the topic I really want to delve into in this introductory blog post. The RAD Studio team has decided to give a significant focus on Windows 10 support and Windows 10 migration (with a series of webinars and blog post over the coming 3 weeks) based on some fairly important business drivers for everyone building Windows applications.
Windows 7 EOL
First and foremost, Microsoft has announced long time ago the EOL (End of Life, or more precisely, end of support) date for Windows 7, which is less than 5 months away, as their page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-windows-7-support states quite clearly:
They leave no doubt about the consequences (although large companies will most likely receive exceptions):
Other Reasons to Move to Windows 10
Now this is a fairly relevant reason to get in touch with any of your customers still on Windows 7 and offer them help in moving to Windows 10. While most of your applications build with RAD Studio will run seamlessly — we have no special runtime requirements or dependencies — it is a great occasion for you to also offer your customers new versions of your applications with an improved user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), better High-DPI monitors support, full integration of platforms features like notifications, and general app modernization. You can achieve some of these features by upgrading to the latest RAD Studio and putting a relatively limited effort in updating your code, adding some newer components, adopting styles, and so forth.
There is also another feature that is relevant in particular if you are selling or distributing applications to end users, and that is the ability to leverage the Microsoft Store as distribution channel for your Windows applications, also easy to achieve thanks to the support for Windows Desktop bridge and APPX format available in the RAD Studio IDE.
Windows 10 Webinar Series
If these are all great reasons to focus on Windows 10, how can you learn more. First, join our webinar series. Sarina DuPont starts today (this evening European time) with a session on “Windows 10 and New Key UX Principles (for RAD Studio Developers)“.
Jim McKeeth has published the complete list with all of the signup links, so I won’t repeat it, just head to https://community.idera.com/developer-tools/b/blog/posts/windows-10-modernize-webinar-series for more information. There are 10 Windows 10 focused webinars, given by us and also by many MVPs, covering the UI, the APIs, comparing to alternative solutions, and discussing migration of third party components.
I’ll be giving one of this webinars, “A tale of 3 APIs: VCL integration with WinAPI, COM & ShellAPI, WinRT” next Wednesday September 4th at 11 am Central time, which is 6 pm European time. I hope you find these webinars and the coming blogs posts useful from the technical point of view, and if you are not using a recent version of RAD Studio check out the latest using a Trial Version: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/start-for-free