CodeRage II Virtual Developer Conference - November 26-30, 2007 External link: http://conferences.codegear.com/coderage07

Be sure you are registered to attend CodeRage II. This is CodeGear's second virtual developers conference. Being virtual it is a whole lot cheaper and easier to attend. The key is to actually schedule time to watch sessions and be sure you are not working or otherwise distracted. If you are overseas that gets even more interesting.

You can always catch the replays later, but then you miss out on the live chat and Q&A session. I must admit, as a presenter it is odd being in the chat room with the attendees while you are presenting - you are both the presenter and the "peanut gallery" at the same time.

You'll see sessions on Delphi, Ruby, Java, PHP, C++, Databases, .NET, Win32 and all the latest CodeGear tools and technologies.

I'll be attending and presenting both. I hope to see you there, virtually of course!

Orcas is Part of the Delphi Family

So I wanted to look up something on Oracs, the as yet unreleased development tool from Microsoft for Vista. So I went to Firefox and typed Orcas into the Google search box. The first hit that came up was on Wikipedia and it turned out to be on Orca (the singular of Orcas). I actually learned a lot.

I knew Orca where killer whales, and I knew they were related to dolphins. What surprised me was that dolphins and killer whales are both in the Delphinidae family. I thought that was really revealing that Microsoft choose that as the code name for their product, especially now that they are playing catch up with Delphi again. In case you didn't know, CodeGear (FKA Borland) now has two IDE's (Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007) released that support Microsoft's Windows Vista, while Microsoft doesn't have one released yet.

Now someone pointed out that you can use .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005 to get some Vista support, but from my understanding you still don't get Sheet of Glass support on your forms, or some of the other neato Aero effects without writing extra code. And to be fair, CodeGear's 2007 releases don't support .NET 3.0 or much of the specific functionality only exposed through .NET 3.0 - then again, it is a native Win32 development tool, so of course it doesn't support .NET.

The significant fact is that CodeGear has two actual releases for Vista before Microsoft does. There are a number of great innovations in Delphi 2007 that Microsoft is yet to copy.

In related news, CodeGear released their Delphi Roadmap, which shows plans for Highlander to be released this year with support for .NET 2.0 and compatibility with .NET 3.0.

It is nice to see Delphi out in front again.

Score: Development tool releases for Vista

• CodeGear: 2
• Microsoft: 0