VB2D: Visual Basic to Delphi Translator

In 1995, Borland introduced Delphi 1.0, a rapid application development tool competing with Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, SQLWindows and Visual C++. Delphi offered a number of significant advantages over Visual Basic version 3.0, including much better performance due to fully-compiled executables, a thoroughly object-oriented approach to program development, and a well-conceived integrated development environment.

We realized that although many Visual Basic developers would prefer to use Delphi, they faced the choice of either rewriting their VB applications from the ground up in Delphi or continuing to maintain these as VB applications. This implied to us a potential market for a Visual Basic to Delphi translator.

We began development of the translator in April, 1995. The product was called VB2D, and version 1.0 first shipped in February, 1996. Later, we completed version 2.0., which translated from VB3 and VB4 to Delphi 2.0.

A Visual Basic to Delphi translation is not a simple undertaking. In the course of investing more than 10,000 man-hours into this project, we developed a very good understanding of both Visual Basic and Delphi, along with many general Windows development issues. This kind of experience benefitted all of our development efforts, whether in-house products or projects on behalf of clients.

Although VB2D is now "history", in its time it was technically successful, well-reviewed in a number of software periodicals, and even received an award for excellence.

JETset: Delphi to Access connection without ODBC

In the mid- to late-90's, Access was the most popular database for Visual Basic programmers. At that time Access was referenced via the JET database engine and its Database Access Objects (DAO). Access gave very good performance as a database, and was well-regarded by most programmers.

When Delphi was introduced by Borland, it was an immediate success because of its fast, fully-compiled executables, its well-thought-out development environment, and its support for true object-oriented development. Many programmers, including many Visual Basic programmers, immediately embraced Delphi and made it their language of choice.

One weakness of Delphi, however, was its lack of support for JET and the DAO. Delphi connected to Access only via ODBC. Unfortunately, performance through ODBC did not match that of JET, and ODBC did not support some of the important features of Access, such as stored queries and replication, among others.

In response to this problem, Eagle developed JETset, a Delphi component which provided direct access to JET and the DAO. With JETset, Delphi programmers could use all the capabilities of Access and JET directly from native Delphi controls. JETset gave the programmer design-time access to JET just as Visual Basic did. When it was introduced, JETset was the only way a programmer could get essentially "native" access to JET and the DAO from Delphi.

Visual Basic Product Release Control Tool

Harris develops a number of applications in Visual Basic. Because of the large number of components and the general complexity of the products themselves, it is a challenging management task to reliably assemble a final product for release.

Harris asked Eagle to assist in the development of an automated release system which would insure the release was composed of correct components. This system integrates with PVCS and other tools used by Harris. The resulting system significantly reduces the effort required for releasing new products while greatly increasing the reliability of the process.