EKON 14 Recap

Right now I’m on my way back home from the Entwickler-Konferenz (EKON) 14 in Darmstadt, Germany. Jim is still there, but I have other duties so I left a day before the conference ends officially.

I had two sessions, the first yesterday was about Delphi Prism language specialties where I talked about cool features like class contracts and also interface delegation. Today I talked about multi platform development with Delphi Prism, concentrating on the apple platforms, both the Mac and iOS using Mono and MonoTouch for the iPhone/iPad.

I also sneaked into other sessions. There was a ‘how do I hack VCL programs’ session that really showed some interesting debugging, dumping and assembler-modification to crack a dongle protected native Delphi application as well as Holger Klemt talking about his personal experience with guys cracking is IBExpert software and what he did against that. Also Ray Konopka had a very interesting session about the Ribbon UI in general.

I especially enjoyed Max Kleiners talk about our PascalScript. Until today I didn’t knew he had built sort of a little IDE for it, called maxBox. It’s a scripting toolbox with a lot of scripatble functionality. He showed (beside other things) how to download a (free) mp3 file from the internet and directly played it from a little script – it was awesome (the demo, that is. Not the music, actually ;) ). maxBox, just like PascalScript that powers the IDE, is open source and you can get the sources from sourceforge. You can find more information about it here: Softwareschule.ch/Maxbox . So go and check it out, it also brings script debugging and syntax highlighting with it and really is a good start for a little scripting with pascal script. At this point I really like to say thanks to Max. Doing that for the purpose of teaching programming and open sourcing the tool is a nice gesture.

Next speaking opportunity for me is at the Embarcadero CodeRage 5 online conference where I have two sessions on Thursday next week. One is about LINQ with Delphi Prism and the other about Hydra, so join me there if you like to. It’s totally online, so no shoes? No shirt? No problem! ;)