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Morning General Session notes


2003-11-04 12:50:58 AM
off-topic6
Well, the morning General Session (just finished) was interesting.
The audience mood was pretty somber. You could tell the Borland folks
thought there would be clapping in spots, and none of us obliged. We
did clap for quite a few things, just not everywhere they seemed to
expect it.
Blake came out and addressed the Delphi issue. Lots of you last night
asked about a Delphi update, and we danced around the issue. Well,
that's because we have exciting news for you this morning! Yes, news
about the Delphi update! At this point, the crowd was actually getting
interested - A Delphi 7 patch/update announcement?
No - Delphi 8 for the .NET Framework. Lots of talk about why it's
cool, how .NET is the future, MS is making it the API instead of Win32,
etc. Very little audience interest. My feeling is that Delphi
developers aren't that e{*word*277}d about .NET. Yes, we need to be able to
get there, but given our druthers, the vast majority of us here at
BorCon seem to want to stay primarily in Win32, and just "toe in the
water" in .NET. Obviously Borland's analysts feel the larger market is
somewhat different, but heck, we're the folks who are paying $2,000 to
get here.
There were some very cool things - the Delphi 1 Fish Facts demo, file
date 02/15/1995, opened in Delphi for .Net, compiled, and ran as a
fully managed .NET application. They built a library in .NET that
exported a function. Then they turned around in Delphi 7, declared the
external function in myNetLibrary.dll, and consumed it perfectly.
Apparently this is a unique feature to Delphi for .NET - you can write
.NET assemblies, then have any Win32 development environment staticly
or dynamically link to the .NET dll.
Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>.
-Brion
 
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

Cool! Thanks for the update!
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Brion L. Webster" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote:
Quote
about the Delphi update! At this point, the crowd was actually getting
interested - A Delphi 7 patch/update announcement?
I doubt we well hear much about this. If Borland promises and fails
to deliver, then it will be a disaster. Dale Fuller's management
motto is: under-promise and over-deliver. This may be what's
happening here.
Quote
No - Delphi 8 for the .NET Framework. Lots of talk about why it's
cool, how .NET is the future, MS is making it the API instead of Win32,
etc. Very little audience interest.
Resistance to change -- not unexpected. The move to dotNet
will not happen overnight, but I fully expect it will happen.
I don't anticipate Microsoft will back down from its commitment
to make dotNet the API instead of win32. Good to see Borland
is making progress in this area. But win32 is not dead yet, and
I have no reason to believe Borland does not understand this.
kjh
 

{smallsort}

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Brion L. Webster" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message
Brion, your un-sugar-coated reports are VERY MUCH APPRECIATED.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

Good coverage, thanks alot Brion!
Wien.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

In borland.public.conference, "Brion L. Webster"
< XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message <3fa69582$1
@newsgroups.borland.com>...
Quote
There were some very cool things - the Delphi 1 Fish Facts demo, file
date 02/15/1995, opened in Delphi for .Net, compiled, and ran as a
fully managed .NET application. They built a library in .NET that
exported a function. Then they turned around in Delphi 7, declared the
external function in myNetLibrary.dll, and consumed it perfectly.
Apparently this is a unique feature to Delphi for .NET - you can write
.NET assemblies, then have any Win32 development environment staticly
or dynamically link to the .NET dll.
The latter is what really caught my attention. I like the ability to create
my own stand-alone executable for those customers that don;'t
have .NET installed, if I am understanding this properly.
Quote

Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>.
That's when I really woke up. The JBuilder Studio thing that integrated
Together, CaliberRM, etc. in the same IDE was nice IMHO. And the
promise that this uber-IDE was coming to other tools too was interesting.
--
***Free Your Mind***
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Captain Jake" <johnjac76[nospam]@comcast.net>wrote in message
Quote
The latter is what really caught my attention. I like the ability to
create
my own stand-alone executable for those customers that don;'t
have .NET installed, if I am understanding this properly.
I would assume that they'd still need the JITter installed, at least.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Brion L. Webster" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message
[..]
Quote
Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>.
ROTFL!!!
Thanks for the report Brion.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Captain Jake" <johnjac76[nospam]@comcast.net>wrote in
Quote
>Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>.

That's when I really woke up. The JBuilder Studio thing that
integrated Together, CaliberRM, etc. in the same IDE was nice IMHO.
And the promise that this uber-IDE was coming to other tools too was
interesting.
All said to be coming to Delphi, but again not exactly when. I got the
impression the initial D8 won't have all of it, but then the ECO talk
seemed to indicate sooner rather than later. Again, just my impressions.
I'm probably wrong.
As to the OP's negative description of the crowd reaction, my only
impression of poor crowd reaction was to the last guy from Accentur (I
think). More of a company ad than what was intended, which was how the ALM
products could be used in a fully managed environment. I felt sorry for
the presenter, as many, many people left in the middle of his presentation.
I also thought Bill Todd's Interbase Stored Procedure and Trigger class was
quite good, even though I've never installed it, but am investigating it.
Looked slicker'n owl <excrement>, to use a Tennessee phrase.
Oh well, gotta get back to the con!
Jeff.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Ken Halliwell" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in news:3fa6aceb$1
@newsgroups.borland.com:
Quote
I don't anticipate Microsoft will back down from its commitment
to make dotNet the API instead of win32. Good to see Borland
is making progress in this area. But win32 is not dead yet, and
I have no reason to believe Borland does not understand this.
This is a yes and no issue, as far as I could see. Longhorn is being built
with .NET 'Whidbey', so it really will be the fundamental API. However,
they showed Visicalc of all things running under Longhorn, and promised the
DOS, Win16 and Win32 layers will be present. What wasn't clear was which
was built on top of the other. We already know DOS and Win16 are not
"under" Win32. It may be that each of these layers will be on top of .NET,
in which case the .NET solution WILL be the native API, and Win32 will be
yet another compatability layer and actually slower than .NET code. Danny
Thorpe's mention of the OS group requiring fully managed code for the OS
core was an indicator that's the way things will be. The OS will be .NET,
and therefore all of the restrictions of the CIL will be in place. At
least that's how I heard it, others can feel free to correct me.
Jeff.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Jeffrey A. Wormsley" < XXXX@XXXXX.COM >wrote in message
Quote
All said to be coming to Delphi, but again not exactly when. I got the
impression the initial D8 won't have all of it, but then the ECO talk
seemed to indicate sooner rather than later. Again, just my impressions.
I'm probably wrong.

Jeffrey, could you please ask one of the ECO guys what the state of the
shipping documentation will be in D8/Architect? The Bold documentation in
D7/Architect was virtually non-existent; and I sincerely hope they don't
make the same mistake again.
- dennis
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

"Dennis Landi" <none[at]none.com>wrote in
Quote
Jeffrey, could you please ask one of the ECO guys what the state of
the shipping documentation will be in D8/Architect? The Bold
documentation in D7/Architect was virtually non-existent; and I
sincerely hope they don't make the same mistake again.

If I'd seen it in time, I could have asked tonight. Even though it's only
9:30 here, it's 12:30 on my internal clock, so I bowed out of the D8 launch
party a bit early. I'll try to remember to ask in the Bold session on
Wednesday.
Jeff.
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

Dennis Landi wrote:
Quote
Brion, your un-sugar-coated reports are VERY MUCH APPRECIATED.
Yeah, please tell that to the goons blocking my entrance tomorrow
morning <g>
I love Borland as much as anyone, but I've got the same needs the rest
of us do too. All the same, I leave it to Ray to ask the politically
sensitive questions in person.
-Brion
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

Mike Swaim wrote:
Quote
>The latter is what really caught my attention. I like the ability to
create
>my own stand-alone executable for those customers that don;'t
>have .NET installed, if I am understanding this properly.

I would assume that they'd still need the JITter installed, at least.

No - you nGen your app on your platform, which results in an .exe bound
to your platform (kinda like Delphi for Win32 - you can only create
windows x86 code, just as if you nGen'd a Delphi for .Net app on a
windows x86 computer).
-Brion
 

Re:Morning General Session notes

Brion L. Webster wrote:
Quote

Then the JBuilder guys came on stage, and I fell asleep <g>.
ROFL!
--
Kristofer