I'm on my way home from the two US editions of Delphi Developer Days 2011, in Baltimore (near Washington) and Houston (Texas). I was so busy that this week I haven't found the time for blogging, although I used twitter a bit. The overall trip was nice, even if I'm getting delayed by storms in Atlanta on my way home. I has a chance to see lontime Italian friends in Washington and spend the Sunday with them (including attending their kid baseball match). And I spend one day at Cary and Loy's home on Lake Houston, including a boat trip with Anders Ohlsson of Embarcadero.
Specifically about the events, we had two nice groups (even if not very large), including a few developers "relateively new" to Delphi, which steered some of them away from more advanced sessions. Still, attendance of the split sessions was quite different in the two cities. I really enjoyed the seminars, including getting back to some of the classic topics like COM development and writing VCL components, but had some fun with the Subversion talk, coverign data access patterns, and talking about REST and jQuery.
The two guest speakers did a great job. Nick Hodges covered DUnit in Baltimore, while Jim McKeeth detailed the cross-platform and phone development strategy of RemObjects in Houston. People wished they could attend both. Anders Ohlsson covered the current features of Delphi XE in his evening events, but also a lot of ground on the 64-bit compiler, including expected changes in data types, in the underlying Windows API, and a few other issues. We had a similar session pointing out some 64-bit gotchas to get people to start preparing their code for the new platform.
Well, I could continue detailing the content of other session (all covered in our 400+ pages courseware book), but since there is still a chance to attend to the event in Amsterdam or Frankfurt, I'll suggest you visit www.delphideveloperdays.com and pick the city you like best (Amsterdam, if I can guess). But sign up ASAP, we might get a full event and have to reject new signups.