After giving my two talks, on Robust Delphi Applications and Delphi for Win32 development for Vista, in Melbourne yesterday, today was Brisbane turn. We had over 100 people yesterday (my guess) and about 80 today. The two talks ended up being quite different, particularly the first, as today there were more questions, which is generally good. Anyway, I'm done for these two days and will relax a bit over the weekend. I liked Allen Bauer presentation of Delphi 2007, which was not a technical one but discussed the internal process of building the product along with the outcome. He started by saying that after the Delphi 2006 survey, it become clear that the demand for Win32 native Delphi is much higher than for the .NET version, and this is how Delphi 2007 was conceived and built in record time. He also unveiled a few hidden features of the product... but that's another story.
On my third day in sunny Australia I saw a little bit of sun, but it is now cloudy. The first day it was raining, the second (in the evening) it was pouring, so this is a progress... let's hope for the weekend. Meanwhile I figured out my new computer (I still have to blog about it) doesn't have a reader for my camera memory card... so I'll have to wait 'till I get home to post any picture. Getting back to my talks, I got a lot of questions, particularly for the one on Vista. Few people in the audience had used it, and some of them were quite shocked to find out the restriction it poses on the use of the file system and the Virtual Storage: whenever a programs writes a file in its own Program Files sub-folder, the file is actually written in a hidden per-user virtual folder. However, when you open the original folder from the application it looks the new file is where it cannot be (that is, right in the protected Program Files sub-folder). Many other topics drew attention, including FastMM4 and custom memory managers, among others. I should publish some of my code in that area... but as usual time is tight!
Need to get back to the closing session now, but will blog again soon (as my blog backlog is growing fast!).