The first day of CodeRage 6 saw JT's Delphi product address and a number of in-depth technical sessions, including a couple of myself.
Delphi Product Address
The first session at CodeRage 6 was John Thomas (JT) RAD Studio product address (the first he has given). He introduced XE2 and FireMonkey (for example stressing that FireMonkey is not a managed platform, like Java or Silverlight.), offered an overview of current technologies, but also had a slide on future plans
His slide of "technology initiatives for the coming years" listed:
- GPU Processing
- Multi-Form Factors (Desktop, Phone, Mobile, Web)
- Multi-Platform Operating Systems (including Android!)
- Web Mobilization
- Cloud Services
- Data Visualization
- Rich User Experience
- Natural User Input
A set of interesting technologies, for sure. He also specifically stated that "We have publicly stated we will supporting Android in the future". I missed the formal announcement... but very good to know!
He mentioned coming FireMonkey support for gestures and video (among other additions) and that he's expecting monthly updates; that they are investigating the Metro UI; they are not really into Windows Phone 7 or BlackBerry (but keeping them on radar). Most important, we should expect an updated roadmap in a matter of weeks.
Other technical sessions
There was several other very nice sessions, including those of Mathew DeLong on DataSnap in XE2 and those of Jim Tierney on Live Bindings. All very informative and interesting, considering there is some lack of documentation in those areas.
The event has been popular, so that they exceeded 1,000 maximum attendees of GoToWebinar (counting individual contact, as it seems the software won't release the "online conference seat" if you log out. So for some time people could not join and they had to "reboot" the event. hay, I though they moved off Microsoft conferencing software. <g>
My own sessions
Next was my session on LiveBindings (less in depth, but hopefully more "applied" to the real world and equally useful). My second session was on multithreading. I missed the session on Oxygene for Android, and might go to bed rather than listen to Anders's session on iOS with FireMonkey. He'll have more sessions on the same topic in coming days.
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow I'll have to more sessions, on REST clients (including cloud support in XE2) and REST servers with JavaScript and jQuery. I'm also looking forward for the sessions given by Ray and Cary, some sessions on FireMonkey and 64 bit. Seems CodeRage 6 is nice... and quite successful in terms of attendance. Which is very good!