Why we need Delphi Prism

What is the need to use Delphi Prism instead of Visual studio? I am a Delphi programmer and like Object Pascal but what is it that Delphi Prism has that others do not have?

Solution

What do you mean by "Delphi Prism instead of Visual Studio"?! Delphi Prism is a pascal-flavor in .NET platform. Visual Studio is an IDE. Delphi Prism uses Visual Studio as its IDE. So when you code in Delphi Prism or debug your prism codes, you are doing it in Visual Studio, just as doing with C# or VB.NET.

.NET is supposed to support multiple programming languages and providing common types and libraries to all languages targeting it. Delphi Prism is just another .NET language. It has access to all the stuff that .NET provides to languages. It also has some distinct language features (refer to PRUZ post).

So you can use Delphi Prism when you want to code in Pascal for .NET platform, or if you really need any of its distinct language features in your .NET applications.

Of course Microsoft's own languages (C#, VB.NET, F#) have little edge in .NET over third-party language providers:

There are so many books and articles - including MSDN - written about MS languages, or written about .NET with C# or VB.NET sample codes (recently Delphi Prism added a tool to automatically convert C# code snippet to Delphi Prism code).
New .NET features would be available first to Microsoft's own
languages first, and then to other
languages, so if you need a really
new .NET feature, you might have to
wait a few months to have it in your favorite language.
And, some IDE features like visual form designer for .NET compact edition are only provided for C# and VB.NET.