I'm at the Software Developers Conference 2006 in the Netherlands. This is a high-quality user-group conference, covering many toosl and technologies. For me it is a sort of re-union with many speakers now in the Microsoft camp (Mark Miller, Guy Smith Ferrier, Chad Hower), and also another chance to meet people from the Delphi community (Bob Swart, Cary Jensen, David I, Brian Long, Jom Cooper, Micheal Li, Jeroen Pluimers).

You might wonder why I'm stressing meeting people more than the conference content. The answer is simple: with so many talks to present I didn't have much time left to attend many others. Some of the topics were indeed interesting, and I did get away wtih some info... but mostly I got interesting info by chatting with other speakers and other attendees. I also missed all of the keynotes as they were given in Dutch!

There was, among others, a presentation by David I on the status of "DevCo" and Borland... nothing really new, but he stressed "investing in a new company" many times over "buying the company assets". He also underlined the fact the IDE division is now hiring people in many areas, but in particular developers and documentation people! He said they are fully at work and that they'll have new information quite soon... while on timeframe for the start of the new company he mentioned the summer (after we Europeans will be back from our long summer vacations, they'll have the new company running).

What else? He showed the roadmap, that looks the same as other shown this year, mentioned the new BDN2, asked for suggestions about the new company name (they might run a contest), which should start with B if possible, so they can retain names like BDS, BDN, TeamB, and the like. My talks went OK (beside one!), and I did some work on ToolsApi add-ins I might make public soon.

Stay tuned.