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Hi everybody,
I have to develop an application using Mappoint 2004, and i'm not sure which language to use. My options are:

- Delphi:
pro: my usual and favorite development environment for desktop apps
cons: not sure if mappoint works 100% with delphi and/or much time is needed to find workarounds, etc

- VB6
pro: it seems that Mappoint works 100% with VB6
cons: VB6 is slowly dying, not being updated and being replaced by VB.NET

- VB.NET / C#
pro: offical MS platform
cons: IMHO .NET is still bloatware for desktop apps; does .NET/COM bridge work 100% with mappoint ?

Thank you

I will say VB6 with a couple caveats but first the pro's -

The Programming Help are all VB6 examples. There will be no need to figure out minor syntactical differences with treatment of collections and arrays for instance.

VB6 is backward compatible with the widest variety of machines/older OS's. I don't know much about commercial software distribution, but I would think this is a big plus.

If you know and like Delphi well, I think there are enough others out there using it with MapPoint that you can't work around any hurdles. by searching in this forum and the like..

If you have a limited number of target machines that you control on which the application will be run, there's no reason you couldn't use VB.NET / C#. There may be some benefit in using the most current libraries / tools that are being released.

Eric

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Hi,

mappoint works 100% with delphi. no workarounds. But for D5..7 you cannot use the ActiveX component and you have to build the component interface yourself. A lot of typework. I have the code but cannot give it for free.

For D8 (and 2005) you can use the ActiveX component without any problem.

I have made experimental test with C#. There is no poblem using mappoint and it is fast.

Take into account that mappoint is not very fast (depending on the customars machines of course), and to speed up you have at least to optimize your own code for speed. VB does not allow (I have read this, not sure) to make unsafe code. C# and Delphi is no problem for that.[/quote]

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rgds, Wilfried Mestdagh
www.mestdagh.biz
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