How to summerize my thoughts on the conference? On my last couple of contracts I have been using other development tools but I really felt a renewed enthusiasm for Delphi over the last week. I had a great time not only learning from some of the Guru's in our field but meeting with developers from all over the country and the world.

One of the main things I got out of the conference is how lucky we, the members of TDUG, are to have access to people like Gerald Nunn and Wayne Niddery who gladly share their knowledge when we have problems or questions. Over the next few months Alfred and I are going to explore ways we can open up the resources of our club to a potential "remote" membership through the internet. We have discussed making video recordings of our meetings available for viewing with Real Video, having online chat SIGs and many other ways we might be able to let those who cannot attend our meetings get involved. If you have any ideas or have some expertise in the fields I have described above and want to help out please feel free to contact Alfred or myself. We won't let you down Terri!!

Sessions

I begin the sessions with Hart Kerbel's talks on Object Oriented Development which were really more about object oriented analysis and design. Hart gave us a good theoretical foundation to build on and familiarized us on how to get started in the the object oriented world.

Ray Konopka's talk on One Step ActiveX was one that I, as someone who develops with both Delphi and Visual Basic, was greatly interested in. Again Ray showcased his talent at making a complex topic understandable while keying in on how to avoid the gotchas that you can spend days trying to figure out.

I am not old enough to have seen him myself <g> but I understand that experts claim that the human hand is not capable of producing the kind of sounds that Jimmy Hendrix made when playing guitar, I wonder what those experts would say if they ever saw Mark Miller write code?

The last time I saw Charlie Calvert speak was at TaDDA!'s Delphi 2 rollout meeting and I had forgotten how entertaining a speaker he was. I saw both of Charlie's talks on using CORBA and MTS with Delphi and was impressed on how similar the two technologies were when being implemented using Delphi.

I found Xavier Pacheco's talk on Intro to Delphi Packages very informative. The introduction of packages into Delphi 3 was a major advancement but it is often little understood how we can use packages to their fullest potential.

A couple of the sessions I attended, specifically Xavier Pacheco's talk on Building Custom Datasets and Micha Somers talk on How to Publish your Data on the Web with Delphi both ended about half way through the alloted time which was slightly disappointing but all in all I have to say that the sessions were as information packed as anyone could handle over a three day period.

Rob Windsor
G6 Consulting
www.g6consulting.com

Presenters Ray Konopka and Jeroen Pluimers

Presenters Jeroen Pluimers and Mark Miller

TDUG's Chris Glynne, Rick Dermont, Rob Windsor and Gerald Nunn