Boise Code Camp 2008

Saturday, March 8th, 2008
At Boise State University in the
College of Business and Economics

Register today to attend free: www.BoiseCodeCamp.org

This free event for technical professionals is produced by the community, for the community.

Code Camp is bigger than ever this year featuring new and exciting technologies, training on fundamentals, a great party, and more.

• 63 sessions from 45 amazing presenters
• The best training value available anywhere
• Fewer slides, more code and examples
• Familiar names and local real-world coders side by side
• An incredible amount of talent and information
• Free lunch, dinner, swag, and giveaways
• Held during non-work hours (we have jobs too)
• Sessions for non-coders as well
• Amazing after party in the BSU stadium Hall of Fame room

No matter whether you are a seasoned coder, a student, a business analysis in software, a project manager, or a hobbyist technologist, there is something at code camp for you. Invest in yourself and come prepared to learn about these things and more:

• ASP.Net
• Agile / Methodology
• Architecture
• Client Development
• Databases and DB development
• Delphi
• Fundamentals
• Games & Graphics
• Google APIs
• I.T. And Operations
• Languages & Frameworks
• Mobile
• Security
• Web Development
• WCF, WF, WPF
• Virtualization
• XML and the Web
• Java, .Net, SQL, Oracle

Register today at www.BoiseCodeCamp.org.

Delphi Survey and the State of Delphi

CodeGear is doing their annual Delphi Product survey. If you haven't taken it yet, I would really encourage you to do it. I know Nick Hodges (Delphi product manager), and he reads all the comments and considers all the feedback very carefully when adding features to future versions of Delphi.

I found it took about 30 minutes to complete, but your mileage may vary. They won't share all the details of the survey, but they will share some of them.

Also, if you haven't seen it, I believe this is the latest Delphi Roadmap.

It still has D2007 as the to be released Highlander, but from everything I have heard, the 2008 Tiburón is still planned to have Generics (aka parameterized types) and Unicode in Win32 (Delphi 2007 delivered Generics for .NET). This is going to be a pretty big change for Delphi Win32. I know we have heard mention of Generics in Delphi for a long time now, but this looks highly likely with it on the official roadmap, and also with the fact it is in .NET and they like to maintain compatibility whenever possible.

While being really cool, the Unicode will also most likely require some code changes in existing applications to support it. Anywhere you assumed a Char to be a length of 1 will need to be updated. Also, storing non-text data in a string may not work right. There are a lot of people are cheering and a lot are grumbling. The survey actually touches on people's concerns with this.

Beyond Tiburón, in the 2009 time frame (code named Commodore) we will see native 64-Bit support, which is also a really big change.

There is also talk about a Delphi Parallel Library (which is actually on the RoadMap for beyond 2009). Allen Bauer has blogged about it quite a bit lately, so I am thinking / hoping it will be here sooner rather then later. The DPL is designed to take better advanced of all the multi-core/multi-processor systems out there. Beyond just thread pools and improvements on threading, I believe we will also see things like allowing a for loop to run each iteration on a different thread, and other language level awareness of multi-threading.

So some really big changes coming in the next couple years for Delphi! We are in exciting times to be working with in Delphi programming!