This is a short overview of the two days I've spend at ITDevCon (agenda here) in Verona, for a very nice Delphi conference organize by the Embarcadero distributor in Italy, Bittime. The conference was packed with information, high quality talks on Delphi for Win32 and Delphi for PHP. I attended only a few selected talks... because I ended up giving 6 sessions myself. For other (and more detailed reports) you can see the blog posts (1 and 2) by Pawel Glowacki.

The conference was not large (about 50 attendees), but given it is a new event and the current economic climate, this was actually better than I thought. The organization was very good, with all of the friendly people of Bittime helping attendees and speakers. My only criticism is that sessions were short with little time in between, and this cause a permanent shift in the schedule, which at times was hard to figure out. Italian attitude, in good part... maybe I'm not too used to conferences in my own country!

What was very nice was the presence of a heterogeneous set of topics and group of speakers, with several PHP gurus (like Jose Leon Serna, author of Delphi for PHP, and Francesco Fullone who heads the largest PHP user group in Italy), quite a few Delphi experts, and talks on Agile methodologies and the like. Kudos to Daniele Teti for a very balanced conference.

Day 1

On the first day there was a schedule talk by David Intersimone, who could not make it to italy but was very kind to set up a Skype video call in the middle of the night (his time). His introduction to All Access was done by Pawel and Fabrizio Bitti, along with an introduction to the conference and the status of Embarcadero. After the keynote I gave a "vendor" session on Advantage Database Server (a database I use, give training on, and resell in Italy). Next I gave a session on two new features of the Delphi language, generics and closures (or anonymous methods). 

In the afternoon I had no session, but needed some time to prepare for the next day, catch up with email, and chat with several attendees and fellow speakers. I attended asession on Subversion by Daniel Magin, one by Daniele on messaging systems and one on PLC development (Delphi is very big in Italy in the industrial automation section). After the sessions there was a brief speaker panel (with almost no questions...), a nice wine tasting opportunity, and than we all went to downtown Verona to see the Arena, Juliette (or Romeo and Juliette fame) balcony, find some food, and relax.

Day 2

On the second day I had to give too many sessions, but still enjoyed the conference. I covered Multitier development with the new DataSnap in Delphi 2009 and 2010, and gave my "classic" session on multithreading (with Pizza references). In the afternoon I attended a session on Enterprise Data Access patterns (good job, Daniele) and gave my last two on Domain Specific Languages in Delphi and on jQuery. This was a session I gave for the first time. I started introducing jQuery, showed it in action live in the Firebug console, and finished with a few demos of a jQuery application talking with a Delphi 2010 REST server. I'll try to work more on JQuery in terms of writing material and presenting it, as it is a very nice technology I've enjoyed using for a few years.

Other sessions I missed were very nice (and I could not get to any by Pawel and Boian Mitov), but as always at a conference with several parallel sessions you have to choose (and some were also conflicting with my own sessions). This has been a very nice event, and hope it will be the starting point for a new Delphi Italian conference to be help every year.

Conferences, Conferences

This was the last public speaking event for this fall (which ended up quite crowded in terms of conferences), but I'm at work with Cary Jensen and his wife Loy to set up our Delphi Developer Days next spring, in the US and Europe. That will probably be the first event in 2010. There is also the option for me to set up a 2-days Delphi 2010 class in English language in December here in Piacenza, Italy. If anyone is interested, let me know ASAP.