I'm back home from the SDC conference in the Netherlands. That's a large conference organized by a developers user group and covering multiple topics, from .NET development to Delphi, from database topics to .NET Nuke. I was involved in the Delphi track and followed mostly its sessions, with occasional glimpses in other topics. Delphi speakers don't have a lot of consideration among the other mostly Microsoft-oriented speakers, but give an interesting opportunity to interact with different point of views. Anyway, here are some sparse considerations and comments to sessions I attended. See also Pawel post on Delphi@SDC2009 for more comments.
First, the conference was considerably smaller than in the past. This is somewhat of a trend, but I got the impression that IT in the Netherlands was hit by the current financial crisis more than other European countries. There were other reasons (school holiday, conflicting conferences) that contributed to the numbers. The Delphi group was close to 50 people. Anyway, the Papendal conference center is very nice (they picked a different ones last year), even if far from Amsterdam, and the new hotel rooms much better. The luxury room Cary Jensen got was just unbelievable in both size and equipment, but all rooms seemed more than adequante (after you learned how to avoid freezing, but that's a different story).
I attended a few other Delphi sessions (beside giving 3 on Windows 7, Multi-threading, and Domain Specific Languages), which is unusual as I generally don't get to many other sessions at conferences I speak at. Anyway, I attended a very nice session with a very detailed overview of RTTI in Delphi 2010 by Delphi compiler-guru Barry Kelly. That was very nice and I did learn a couple of extra tricks I still have time to add to my book. He gave a second very intriguing session about writing a Garbage Collection and a Binary Serialization mechanism in Delphi, taking advantage of the new RTTI. His code was very tight but extremely powerful. Kudos. I wanted to attend Dr. Bob talk on DataSnap, but that was in Dutch!
Outside of the Delphi topics, I attended Hadi's session on jQuery (this was a replacement session for another speaker), which happend to be part of the Delphi session. I attended mostly because I'm going to speak on the exact same topic at the Italian ITDevCon (for which I still have discounted tickets), and wanted to see the appraoch of his presentation. Very nice session on a technology I liek and use a lot. Another session I attend was a disappointment. It was meant as a critique to relational databses in the current web distributed model, and it ended up almost as a compariosn between a stand alone SQL Server and using it on Azure. When facing issues in SQL Server (scalability, locking problems, and the like) the apparent solution was to suggest the same DB in a different deployment mode, rather than look at alternatives. The fact MySQL scales way better, has faster navigational interfaces, and is in fact used for most huge sites was not even omitted, but totally out of the picture as the equivalence was "relational model = Microsoft SQL Server". Very annoying, but not alone. Notice this was an architectural talk, not a vendor pitch.
Speaking of marketing, there was an "advanced" launch of Windos 7 that seemed quite technically oriented (seemed as it was partially in Dutch and after a while I ended playing soccer with the XBox console sitting in the main conference room...). Anyway, waiting for the end of the session proved useful as I won a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate (quite nice, even if I already have one). I won it along with 99 other people, but several hundred didn't win, so it was something.
What else? Beer was very good, as usual, food above average for the Netherlands (even if I really cannot get used to milk or milk shakes at lunch), and the hospitality of the organizers absolutely great, as we now almost expect. This is a unique conference, from many point of views, and one worth attending and speaking at, so keep an eye for next year conference.