Yesterday I hosted a 70-people Delphi event in Piacenza, the 9th edition of our yearly Delphi Day event.

We had Jason Vokes live, presenting the current status of Embarcadero and the efforts the company is making to push Delphi and create a better marketing and communication strategy for the product. It was a very broad non-technical talk, but quite interesting and to the point. At the end of the day David I, connected from Scotts Valley, gave an overview of the recent Delphi road map, and answered quite a few questions form the audience. Due to some lack of bandwidth, we disabled the webcam sharing, so we saw his slides and hears his voice live. From time to time the bandwidth would drop a little, and the audio would seems like an LP played at wrong speed, but it was occasional and most of the session was easy to follow.

These two session helped attendees catch up with the news, but there was nothing the hard-core Delphi developers didn't already know. Some of the more technical sessions were very interesting. I gave a plenary session along with a co-worker (Paolo Rossi) titled "Delphi & Data Everywhere". We covered new and unusual way to access to data from a Delphi application, including:

- using a database in the cloud, namely demoing SQL Azure by Microsoft

- using NoSQL databases, through their REST interfaces

- storing documents using Google Docs from a Delphi application

I might blow and/or write a paper/article on these technologies soon. In the afternoon we had two tracks covering database tools (Using ER/Studio for migrating data and using the new Advantage Database Server 10 to convert a dBase application to support Unicode) and on tools for managing the development (Mantis for bug tracking, subversion for versions control, and tools for continuous integration).

Overall the event went smoothly, there were may questions by attendees, and a lot of interaction. the event was smaller than last year, but the current status of the economy certainly didn't help). The overall quality of attendees was quite high.

Update: Added some of the answers (in short form) as I recall them, as the post was giving the impression that questions were unanswered...

To conclude, I'll list for you and for Embarcadero product managers a few questions that were asked (and were all answered):

• We are hitting the 2GB (actually 3GB) Windows memory limit and we need the 64bit compiler. When we'll have that? Answer:  The preview of the compiler is expected early next year, according to the current road map.
• Do you think you'll support Android with a native compiler? And what about the iPhone and Windows phones? Answer: All 3 platforms are relevant and will be evaluated, depending on actual usage and on openness (like SDK license, flexibility in term of tools and deployment)
• Can we have the Firebird dbExpress driver with no license limitation in the Professional, so we don't have to buy third party tools (as we won't buy the Enterprise any way). Answer: what to put in the Professional and Enterprise version is under review for next version (this was my answer, one I had in a different context)
• Will there be a free version of Delphi for Universities and schools? Answer: working for it, Jason was quite positive about working to push adoption in schools.
• Can you overcome the limit of 64.000 lines of source code per unit in the debugger (yes, someone has this problem in Delphi 2007)? Answer: No one had any idea about this problem (I had personally never heard about it).
• Will the cross-platform framework offer a native look-and-feel for the Mac? Answer: the idea is to have a proper look and feel but not use native libraries for each platform, but develop a cross platform component library.
• What's the status of Nevrona and will the fix the problems with Rave? If not where do we migrate our reports? Answer: the R&D team is in contact with Nevrona on the issue (again, an answer I received in a different context and repeated)
• How healthy is the third party components market and will they keep updating their Delphi components? Seems quite healthy to me (personal answer, not from Embarcadero).
• How many developers are building Delphi? Why they don't add more? Answer: The team has grown over the last few years and Embarcadero in investing more in the product than it was done in the past. No official numbers. It is not that adding people to a project magically works (as all developers know).
• Are you thinking of creating a more modern and flexible UI layer, not based on User and GDI, like WPF? Answer: in the roadmap they is an indication for new / more modern UI models, even if with no specification of the details.
• ... and many others I'm forgetting

Overall, it was a nice event, with a full day of seminars (like pre-conference tutorials). I'm pretty sure this will be followed by the tenth edition, next year. Hope we'll be able to have a very special event.

BTW, as I mentioned before I'll skip some of the coming conferences like Delphi Live and the next EKON. Still in th fall. I'll be in Denmark, possibly Germany, possibly the Netherlands, probably Italy... but I'll keep you posted, of course.