The EKON conference is going along very nicely, as expected. As I mentioned in my blog yesterday, I took pictures of the keynote yesterday and I've now posted them on Picasa, at the address http://picasaweb.google.com/marco.cantu/Ekon1102. After the morning keynotes and Ray's presentation, I gave my Vista talk (there was a good crowd, seems attendees enjoyed it), and bumped for a few minutes in an "empty room" (3 people) where Michael Li was covering migration to ASP.NET 2.0. I was really sorry for Micheal, it seems the crowd is really made of die-heart win32 Delphi developers.
By the way, the conference is not as big as in the past, but not too small either. The "problem" is that most of the people are long-time attendees, it is really like a family, and most of the faces are familiar form past years. This is very nice, but also a clear sign that Delphi is not attracting new developers. And like last year, it's almost an all-male conference (I mention this because someone yesterday reminded me of my blog comment about last year EKON).
The evening was very nice. I was invited at a German CodeGear dinner (great food, thanks again), there was a very good company, we had a lot of fun with the waitress and Nick bitching each other (at one point, the waitress asked Nick if even a small beer would have been fine, and offered him a tiny liquor glass with beer). The Casino event was cute, I played poker and won a few good rounds. Money was fake and "unlimited", which helped a lot having fun. There was also a lot of beer, and the end of the day was a funny table soccer math with (against) Massoud.
Today, I attended Ray Konopka's presentation an WPF controls and now I'm sitting in Hadi's Advanced IntraWeb talk. I know I should get ready for my FunSide of Delphi tonight, as the demos for my Dynamic Applications talk are ready. But I'm interested in IntraWeb and I'm also blogging...
By the way, I sold a couple of copies of the book directly at the conference (while sales on Lulu are very strong), if you are at EKON I have a few more copies on sale and I can even sign them for you!