Product Update – What’s Currently in Flight and Where are We Headed?

Before I dive in, for those who may not know me, let me take a brief second to introduce myself.  My name is Brandon Shopp and I joined the Embarcadero team from the acquisition with IDERA and lead the product management team and am very excited to be apart of this team with great products and a passionate community of users.

As a follow up to the update that Atanas posted, I wanted to dive in and expand on a couple areas as well as talk about what to expect from me and my team in the coming months and beyond.   As Atanas indicated, we shared with the community our roadmap plans shortly after the New Year and the teams have been focused on this and we continue to deliver against this with high quality.  We have many things currently in various stages of progress that I wanted to touch on.

• RAD Studio Berlin 10.1 Update 1 – we are down to the final handful of bugs to address and then will enter testing and acceptance.  This has approximately 250 fixes along with several new features.

• New Free Tool – we will be updating and re-releasing our command line compiler for C++, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

• RAD Studio Berlin 10.1 Backports for XE8 and 10 Seattle – this is in active development right now

• VCL Designer & Components – this is a set of new designers for VCL that leverage the product and technologies from Ray Konopka, plus a new set of VCL controls focus on the Windows 10 UI experience that we have had our development network working on that Atanas referenced in his post.  This is coming along nicely from a development perspective and is soon to enter QA and we have been having the discussion internally on the best release method to deliver this.  An Update after we release Update 1 for Berlin or Godzilla.  Would love to hear the community’s thoughts on this front.

• Linux Tech Preview & Code Name Godzilla Release – we are making solid strides forward with respect to the tech preview as well as the release itself.  Expect more info on the tech preview as we get closer to sharing it with folks for feedback.

Many great things highlighted above, but that is not all.  As Atanas and I have spoken about before, we are all very much committed to not only the development tools space, but also in continuing to move the core Delphi language forward and our C++Builder product as well.  Specifically around the development tools space, we recently completed an acquisition of a terrific company in Berlin called Gurock, which you can read more about here and more details to come on this soon..  We would love to hear what other use cases and technologies you use on a day-to-day basis like this.  

We also have a terrific product management & strategy team here at Embarcadero.

• Marco Cantu or as I call him, Mr. Delphi

• Sarina DuPont who is our Jane of all trades driving FireMonkey, our new installer technology, IDE work along with many more things.  

• New to the team and as you may have seen on the blog David Millington came on board with his initial focus as he comes up to speed on C++Builder.  David just returned from the C++ Standards Committee meeting in Oulu, Finland last week and participated in some great meetings and discussions.  

David and I have been having some really good discussions about advancing our Clang support and how do we pull in new updates more rapidly. Marco and I are having great discussions on the Delphi side about pushing the language forward, for example introducing  nullable types.  We are not just thinking about now, but also where we can take the technology in the future. We have been getting really great feedback and ideas from the community that the team has been discussing and we need to continue to hear that input from you.

As we have been executing on the roadmap for about 6 months and are currently working on various Godzilla items, it is about time to publish an updated roadmap to give insight into what we are thinking beyond that.  Beyond our normal input gathering methods from customers and other sources internal and external, we intend to give more advanced notice to the MVP community as well to ensure their input is also heard and can have direct impact as well.  Expect that  in the next 4-6 weeks we will publish an updated roadmap for your input and feedback on.  If at any point in time any of you want to discuss an idea, etc. we are always available.  Many of you know the PM team already and you can reach me at first name dot last name at embarcadero.com.

Exciting times ahead and looking forward!!