I'm in Rome today for the last of the three Delphi Open Doors (Delphi Porte Aperte) events around Italy. Yesterday we did the same session in Piacenza (near Milan) and the day before in Padua (near Venice). We've had a total of 100 developers attending, which is more than we originally expected. What is the event about and which was the feedback?

The event is not a technical presentation of the latest features of Delphi, although I have touched on some of those, but mostly a chance to discuss with other developers the status of Delphi from an large perspective. The first talk focuses on the role of native Win32 applications in today's development world. If web development and managed code play a larger role than before, native programs still have a few peculiar advantages and Delphi plays a prominent role among Win32 development environments (the only other significant alternative being Visual C++ with MFC).

Three shorter sections discuss the current status of Delphi and the near-future public roadmap (Unicode, Win64), the current Vista support, highlight some outstanding features of the Object Pascal language, covers dbExpress and 3-tier architectures. The focus is clearly all on Win32 and database-oriented applications, ignoring on purpose Web development. However, Internet-based or Internet-aware client programs (starting with Skype) are certainly mentioned.

The feedback was very positive, as people felt relaxed in learning Delphi has still a long history ahead and Win32 development is far from dead. On the other head it became clear (to myself and to others) that the Delphi community and the Delphi jobs and components markets are changing, with professional competence and quality rewarded more than in the past. Which is not bad!

A few people have requested the slides of the event but (i) they are in Italian (ii) they are minimalistic and offer very limited information without the speaker. Maybe I should record a session... but Nick Hodges could equally do it, as I "borrowed" many ideas and even some actual slides from his "Native Applications in a Managed World" talk at the recent EKON 2008 Spring conference (search my blog for more information).

Not that I'd really see Rome, as I arrived by train at 12.45 pm and will leave at 7.30 pm, in time to get back home for the night.