The CodeRage 2007 virtual conference has started with the keynote (mostly a company and overall products presentation by Michael Swindell). At the beginning everything was fine. With too many people joining (400+ in the chat room), the audio plus video stream got bandwidth problems, and was eventually replaced by an audio-only feed. Right now Nick Hodges is giving his Delphi product address with audio only. Hope they'll fix the problem before my presentation tomorrow!
In any case, there was one interesting piece of information in Micheal talk. First, he referred to Delphi as "The Delphi Family of products" (see my recent post on Delphi being now a brand name). Second, he claimed three languages pass the "is this Delphi?" test, PHP, C++, and Object Pascal. Yes, he referred to the language recently known as the Delphi Language as the Object Pascal language. Exactly what I hoped for!
He didn't show a full road map, but mentioned new features to be implemented in a short time frame (less than 1 year) as "Vista, MSBuild, DBX4, .NET 3.0, Generics" and new longer term features (more than 1 year) as "Unicode, 64bit". He quoted also a set of Delphi 2007 Design Goals:
- Make Vista seamless
- Unify the database framework
- Make the build system more powerful
- Make the IDE lightining fast
- Continue to improve IDE quality
- Radically improve the help system
- Make it the new "favorite" Delphi release
Nick is still talking, his voice comes and goes... By the way, he just referred to the language as "Object Pascal slash Delphi" language.