Nick Bradbury has released FeedDemon 1.5, with 15 billion new features and bug fixes (If you’ve been keeping up with the bleeding edge beta versions, it’s not quite so much of a jump though).

Also Nick has offered us a glimpse into his development environment, which is great. It’s easy as a developer to get stuck into thinking that the language and procedures you use are The Way^™, but there’s usually more than one way to do it

As some of you know, I used Delphi to create all of my shareware programs (HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon), and I’ve been very happy with it (although I will admit that I’m toying with C# as well). One of the main reasons I use Delphi is because it creates fast executables that don’t require runtime DLLs. Before I created HomeSite I was a client-server developer working in Visual Basic, and VB’s runtime DLLs were a constant source of problems. I had enough trouble trying to support people in the same building who had DLL-related problems – I can’t imagine trying to deal with these same problems with shareware, where your application is used all over the world on countless different computer configurations.

Nick, I know your pain! DLL Hell is the bane of every Windows programmer. If I knew then what I know now I really don’t think I would have ever developed in VB6. .NET is another story however.