Back in the 80's Borland turned the programming world on its ear with the Turbo Pascal language compiler. Not only did it cost a tenth of the going rate, it had features the ponderous high-priced compilers lacked. Turbo Pascal brought programming within reach of just about anybody. Its innovative integrated development environment became an industry standard—editing, design, compiling and debugging within a single program. Borland's development tools have gradually grown to rival Microsoft's in size, complexity…and price. With the free Turbo Explorer line, Borland returns to its roots, bringing programming to the masses.

Each of the four Turbo Explorer "personalities" targets a different combination of programming language and platform:

• Turbo Delphi for Windows
• Turbo C++ for Windows
• Turbo Delphi for .NET
• Turbo C# for .NET

The products are source-code compatible with Borland Developer Studio, which costs from $1,000 to $3,500. For each language there's a free self-contained Turbo Explorer version and a $399 Turbo Professional version that lets you install third-party components or create your own. One limitation—you can only install one of the Turbo products per computer.

I got my hands on an advance copy of Turbo Delphi for Windows—a hefty download at over 500MB. After installing the product, I loaded and compiled several of the utilities I wrote for PC Magazine in years past—InCtrl 5, Startup Cop, Change Of Address, DiskPie, and more. Turbo Delphi passed this quick sanity check with flying colors. Most of the utilities compiled and ran, smooth as silk. I had to tweak a few lines in some that were written for older Delphi versions, but the compiler pinpointed the problems. Even oddball features like non-rectangular windows and text-to-speech came through fine. I only had one failure—a utility that relied on a component I wrote myself. As noted, the Turbo Explorer editions are self-contained and don't support adding third-party components.—next: Visual Design >