Thoughts from BorCon04

Well, I got to BorCon a little late as I was enjoying California sun. But I did catch Danny Thorpe’s talk on the future of the Delphi language. I was glad to see for..each support being added. I hear the other guys are adding it as well. I think this is a great validation of the work we did in C# (and well before in VB). I was also impressed by the how deep Danny went. He was showing off how the Delphi compiler emits nest methods by using ILASM. Pretty cool stuff; apparently the Delphi folks are my kind of geeks ;-).

I spent a couple of hours at the booth giving away posters and doing demos of Console Invaders and the RSS ScreenSaver from the C# express Edition. It would good to get to talk to Borland customers. Many of the folks I talked to are happy to laugh at how Microsoft has started to “catch-up” to Delphi in terms of productivity.

I only had a 30 mins or so to spend in the session on .NET Framework for Delphi developers. The speaker made an interesting point… Without Delphi there would be no .NET... his evidence is that Delphi first had all of these… maybe he has a point

Single-inheritance

Strongly typed

Properties and events

Exceptions

Component model

Etc….

I was then off to the user group… More on that later…

BTW – any early risers here at BorCon, you can catch my session on CLR 2.0 at 8a in room J2… I’ll have some free copies of my BCL reference book to give out. (they also have them at the book store in the exhibit hall).