Last Thursday I was in Paris for the Delphi XE launch, part of a number of Delphi presentations in France called "Codeway Tour". The full-day event with well over a hundred attendees (including some from very large companies) was very interesting and I really have to thanks the organizer (and particularly Thierry Laborde) for inviting me to speak (and for a very good dinner).

I gave a session on REST development in Delphi, showing some of my classic examples (see my white paper of the last year) but also new clients and servers. In particular, I created a demo using the new Azure client components (available in Delphi XE) and some of the new server-side REST capabilities of the product, with the JavaScript proxi generation. My second session was on Windows 7 development, with very little content specific to Delphi XE, but showing many reasons to upgrade from older versions and discussing technical issues of the latest Windows platform.

There were many other interesting sessions, some of which in French I could only partially follow, but others in English by Bruno Fierens and David I. This one in particular was quite interesting, not only because David I introduced the current status of Delphi, showcasing many Delphi applications, the future plans according to the roadmap, and the overall "Native Delphi Everywhere" vision by Embarcadero. But to prove things are not as negative as they might sound (given the recent delays in the roadmap) and that a lot of compiler work has already been done, he showed:

• a Delphi 64-bit console application that could allocate a single 5GB memory block and write in every byte of it
• the Mac compiled version of Delphi classic FishFact demo, which worked OK beside a repaint issues in the selected cells

He also mentioned support for iPhone with Prism and MonoTouch (which was demonstrated in a later session), future plans for supporting devices natively, and much more. I'll attend another presentation by David I in his European tour in Rome next week, we'll let you know if there is any further update.