CodeRage III was a huge success last week. I attended a few sessions in addition to my own, and for the most part, everything ran smoothly. There was one room change, and LiveMeeting disabled audio from time to time, but once you learned how to re-enable it then it wasn’t that big of deal.
I understand Christine and Anders were working really hard behind the scenes to keep it all running smoothly though. At one point Christine’s microphone was unmuted in Room 1 and it was very obvious she was rather annoyed with some of the technical challenges live meeting was presenting.
Delphi Robot Rage was a success, despite LiveMeeting having issues with my video. Seems their codec is optimized for window screens, not 3D game video. Jamie Ingilby took first place with his Delphinium bot, but all the bots performed really well.
In the closing keynote Embarcadero’s Wayne Williams opened up with some pretty dry financials. Basically covering where the economy is headed and that Embarcadero is still investing with 40% on R&D. Additionally he answered the question he keeps getting about when, how and why they are going to kill Delphi. He said they are not. They like Delphi, in fact, before being a CEO got in the way Wayne was a Delphi developer.
I think the most exciting part of Wayne’s talk was the slide marked “The Future” which listed some of the company wide research initiatives underway. It specifically listed Mac, Linux, Cloud, Application Virtualization, FireBird, Touch, 64bit, SMP and Multi-core. When I asked about a Delphi for Mac and Linux they said that today, with Delphi Prism and Mono you could reach Mac and Linux, but in their labs they were working on native support, and that they had a significant head start.
You might recall in my podcast with Nick where there was a question about Linux support again he said that Commodore was going to have a pluggable compiler so one IDE could compile to two different platforms, so it seemed possible that other compilers could be added to support other platforms.
It was great to see Firebird in a positive light again. It certainly looks like it is going to start receiving proper support from Delphi. That is something to look forward to for sure.
There was also an open discussion of subscription model to buy Embarcadero’s tools under. A number of people were really excited about that. Wayne also said there is more focus on the Turbo’s, with the recently announced TurboRuby, and new entry level products planned for mid next year!
Overall, Wayne’s keynote was a huge hit with the chat room. It certainly seems like Delphi is in good hands and headed the right direction.
Nick is busy at work on updated .NET and Delphi native roadmaps, and we can expect to see those soon. He mentioned via Twitter that 64-bit was going to take a bit longer than expected. I would suggest that this doesn’t mean Commodore will be late, but maybe that they won’t include as many other features in it as they had originally planned.
Marco Cantu released his new Delphi 2009 Handbook. He was off to some great early sales during the conference. The PDF version of his book is available to all registered Delphi 2009 users. Marco licensed it so they can distribute it however they please, but Marco figures these are really more advertising then a threat to his sales. I would agree with him. You really can’t beat having a physical book on hand.
Anders has already started posting the replays. If you missed the session on Compact Framework development with Delphi Prism be sure to check that one out. David Clegg shows how to use the visual WinForms designers to develop for the Compact Framework. Also Craig Stuntz’s session on Functional Programming with Delphi was a real eye opener.
Delphi Prism is officially released now, and command-line compiler is a free download. When I was finishing up my Robot Rage session my Prism license expired. Turns out I was still running the beta. I fought with the license for a bit, and finally just decided to use a text editor and the command line compiler. It worked great. So having this command-line compiler freely available is a great benefit. It can be used for open source development, hobbyists, and also be installed on a web server to deploy your .pas files to the server with your ASP.NET solution.
Olaf Monien has a video on how to enable “Sync Editing” with Delphi Prism. It makes use of the free DXCore from DevExpress. (Sorry for spelling and pronouncing your name wrong.)
Well that is it for this week and our CodeRage wrap-up. I hope you all enjoyed CodeRage as much as I did. Join me next week when I will have marc hoffman back on to discuss the future of the Oxygene compiler and some of the other exciting things that RemObjects is up to.
