Delphi Live — Day 2 Recap

Day 2 was busy and eventful. We started out with Sebastian‘s presentation of Hydra, our cross platform plugin framework that allows you to mix and match code written in Delphi/Win32 and in .NET (preferably of course Delphi Prism, but also C#, VB or any other CLR language) in the same application. Sebastian built an application from scratch that hosted a WPF based Telerik gauge control in a native Win32 application. He also showed how to communicate bidirectionally between the managed plugin and the host, by creating interfaces that are shared by both sides of the equation.

Sebastian’s second session later that day focused on language features that are specific to Delphi Prism, including class contracts, the colon operator sequences and iterators, future types and much more. The session quickly developed into an interactive workshop, where Sebastian write code on the fly to illustrate various aspects of the language based on questions from the audience, and it was my impression that all attendees were quite intrigued by the capabilities offered by Delphi Prism (both compared to native Delphi, and compared to C# and other .NET languages). Many times, we heard the question “when will we get this feature in native Delphi?” ;)

Jim rounded off the day with a short introduction into Silverlight (with Delphi Prism), a talk that he would repeat the next day with more detail in the form of an intensive 3.5 hour workshop. Jim gave a thorough introduction to the platform, from basic concepts such as XAML and layouting to more advanced topics such as data bindings (including a sort excursion into Data Abstract with a demo on how to connect a Silverlight client to data from our PCTrade sample server). Most of the attendees were new to Silverlight (or even .NET) and, from the feedback we got, found the two sessions intriguing and were looking forward to work with Silverlight, more.

Over the course of the day, two other sessions by Ray Konopka of Raize Software (who’s CodeSite Express is now included as part of Delphi Prism, by the way) and Cary Jensen rounded of the Delphi Prism coverage, with Cary presenting ASP.NET development and Ray providing an excellent and thorough introduction to WPF. After Ray’s talk, even i was tempted to take a closer look at playing with WPF, again. And that’s saying something ;).

To close the day of, Jim, Sebastian and i got talked into the In-N-Out Burger experience, so we went along with David I, Mike Rozlog and Al Mannarino to have a round of Double Double Animal Styles (well, most of us). Fun was had, although i must admit that i, myself, was underwhelmed by the burgers…