I'm back home from Verona, Italy (well, not that far...), where I attended the nice ITDevCon Delphi conference, packed with great speakers and content. The conference is organized by Bittime, the Italian representative of Embarcadero, and had about 50% of the session in English and 50% Italian, although only a fraction of the attendees were from outside Italy (foreign speakers outnumbered other foreign attendees).
(Me: Photo by Primoz)
I gave one session of migration to Unicode (still a hot topic for many) plus one on REST and cloud clients (Amazon, Azure, Google) and one on the development of REST servers with Delphi XE DataSnap, using JavaScript (including the generated proxies) for the client side. I showed how to integrate jQuery with the DataSnap REST structure... and think my sessions were well received (I gave them in Italian, cutting off English speakers).
(Speakers: Photo by Primoz)
As expected by looking at the list of speakers, the quality of the sessions was excellent. I did attend only a handful of classes (from Italians like Paolo on ExtJS and Nando on InstantObjects) and from speakers I had never heard presenting (like Primoz on FastMM and Alexander on debugging). There were many other interesting sessions by Cary, Ray, Thierry, Bruno, Pawel, Daniele, Jose Leon... certainly worth attending but often conflicting with session I had to give or others I attended (or sessions I already attended at other conferences).
Overall, a very nice conference, even if with a limited number of people (about 50, if you didn't count speakers and staff)... or maybe a ncie conference also because of the limited number of people, which allowed a lot of interaction, questions, and chats. Primoz has a report with many pictures (including those I've used in this post, with his permission), and Bruno has a blog post with a video of Thierry and his home-made touch table powered by Delphi, available below:
Overall a very nice conference, worth attending. Hopefully Fabrizio will organize it also next year... and Embarcadero will do a better job promoting it throughout Europe and attending directly (Pawel was there, but more as a speaker than an official Embarcadero representative).