• The new installer gets you set up right away without any hussle. Furthermore, even the registration process is handled very easily. You do not have to fiddle with any long key strings. You simply enter your user credentials and setup will select your products. VS2008 and VS2010 can be used side by side and the installer registers all the components in both IDEs – if you wish to.
• Uninstall is just as easy and leaves no baggage behind. I think everybody who ever used a 3rd party component set knows what I am getting at…
• One installer, all the products. I just love to only have to download one file, run one installer and also only to have to enter my user credentials once. A real time-saver. You have all the components for the different frameworks and also the IDE tools. Best, if you do not like it that way, DevExpress offers individual downloads as well.
• Full integration into VS 2010. The new Visual Studio has been released recently and I can make full use of it with all the controls I need. In particular all the designers and little IDE helpers work for the full development experience.
• VS is using WPF now. DevExpress offers huge improvements in that area. The new WPF controls and the added features to the already existing WPF control set made me realize how useful the subscription is in order to stay up-to-date and be able to deliver new, innovative technologies to my customers.
• ASP.NET MVC support. Heck, I have been waiting for that. I love the MVC approach for web applications and I truly did not develop any bigger projects with MVC as I was missing the variety for controls I could use. Yes, there are JavaScript libraries, but I did not have enough time to learn yet another language
• Grids, Layout Controls and Charts. All my apps rely heavily on displaying and editing of data (I mean, most apps do). The component set offers me a very good toolset, not only to allow the user to browse data, but also to edit data. 2010.1 really took yet another giant leap forward in that area as all basic components like textedit, button edit etc. are available in WPF now as well.

I could go on and on, but those are my favorite aspects I am very excited about.

I am a big big fan of strategy games on the PC platform. Thus, I bought Anno 1404, definitely a purchase I never regret as the game is truly the best real-time strategy game I ever played so far. I bought it from a vendor at Ebay as he had the best price. The language of the product was German. I played all campains and recently an Add-On for the game has been released. I bought that as well at a very good price, but did not pay attention to the language of the game. It was localized in English. I tried to install it, but I got immediately the error message that the game was in German and that it was impossible to add the new features to the German version. Understandable, but why have separate DVDs for seperate countries?

RAD Studio is so much better in this regard, because you simply cannot buy the wrong product. You get all the languages and you can even switch between different languages without having to install it again! All the patches are multi-language as well. What is the down-side? One might say that it takes longer for a product to be released but I know from first-hand experience that localization can be done right from the start and thus there will be no delays.

Having separate products with different languages truly is something that is not good for the customer.  Just thinking of Microsoft Office e.g. where the different localizations offer different difctionaries and it becomes really tough which language to install and also which patch to apply as there are more than one, one for every localization.

Thus, once again, this makes the flexible localization one of the most underrated features of RAD Studio.

Oh, yes, I had to order another Anno 1404 — this time in English.