Today I gave two talks, one on Design Patterns in Delphi ( I gave it already in the past, but some of the demos have been updated); the other on Dynamic Architectures with Delphi (this is a brand new talk). Seems the two talks were well received, even if I was worried because I've had some negative reports on the Design Patterns talk in the past.
My Design Patterns talk, in fact, is somewhat unusual. Instead of sticking to the classic implementaion of patterns I tend to apply them to Delphi's RAD development style, making it more OOP-oriented but not going against it. For example, I add interfaces to visual controls to make them part of patterns design. I also use interposer classes and other low-level tricks, so this becomes a session on advanced Delphi coding techniques, beside covering patterns. Anyway, if you attended (and even if you didn't) you can find the code here (as I promised to the attendees).
In my Dynamic Applications talk I covered how to use runtime packages effectively, load them at runtime (using examples also discussed in Mastering Delphi 2005), and even unload dynamic packages to reload an updated version without stopping the executable file. Not common, but interesting, I hope. Anyway, if you were at the session the code is available here.
The Speakers Session was a question and answer session with most speakers attending. Topics included dotNet versus Win32 development, why VCL for .NET, choice of database servers, writing database store procedures in Delphi (with InterBase UDF or the new SQL Server support for assemblies) , my future books (someone asked me, I swear)... and speakers asked the audience about the technologies they use... we had some good laughs as well.
Now, I'm sitting in a session by Hadi Hariri (of IntraWeb fame) introducing AJAX... just to figure out how he presents it, getting ready for my full day tutorial on Web 2.0 (and AJAX) in Delphi on Friday. I hope I'll be able to post the slides for that tutorial. In the evening there will be a event for the ten years of EKON, with a band... and probably a lot of beer.