I've not blogged a lot from the SDN Conference, so here is a post-conference summary. First of all, let me say that the conference was very enjoyable as usual, and the SDN group was a very good host. Still I'm not sure if having free drinks (that is, free beer) for speakers is such a great idea, as I saw a few that had gone a little too far (although it was probably because of those other stronger drinks). But that's another story.
From a more technical perspective, what I like about this event is the mix of .NET and Delphi experts, with a few official speakers from Redmond or very close to Microsoft. This makes quite an interesting mix, and the questions (oh Delphi, what is that? wasn't it dead?) abound. You I also got to know many other speakers (even female speakers), a rare case in Delphi-focused events. Only, I'm not sure while they all thought I was danish...
Getting back to .NET, I also attended a keynote about the new data access technologies (from the Entity Framework onwards). Apparently Microsoft delivered a ton of new libraries in a service pack. Now I find this very odd, but I fear this implies rushing out new ideas with some lack of vision. The fact they are working on two new data access and design technologies almost in parallel (Entity Framework and Olso) is causing me some confusion. I'm not sure the .NET speakers would agree, though. However when after 5 steps the we saw an ASP.NET application based on scaffholders (a la Ruby) I realized the same could be done in Ruby way faster and with a more clean and clear structure. But I don't know much of either to be a real judge. The discussions about .NET got me back thinking why native development in Delphi is so nice, but that will be the topic of a separate post I've already promised to a few people.
What about Delphi at the SDN conference? There were several interesting talks, and I attended two by Nick Hodges (as you know from my previous post, which caused quite a stir) and one on DataSnap 2009, as I had to finish my own talks and had to skip those in Dutch. The Delphi part of the group seemed in a better mood than in past years. So, contrary than someone commented on my blog, I think this was a conference worth attending. Too bad I missed the post-conference Holland Tour for speakers...