I headed over to the conference center at 6:45 since the continental breakfast started at 7:00 AM.
The General Session was next. Borland officially launched Delphi 8 for the Microsoft .NET Framework and JBuilder Studio 7. Many demos where shown. Most impressive, the FishFacts demo from Delphi 1 was brought up into Delphi 8 and compiled and ran without any errors. The integration between CaliberRm / Together and JBuilder X was really impressive as well.
I attended Brad Merrill’s session on Writing Faster CLR Code and picked up a few pointers for writing faster CLR code. Found out that method inlining is disabled if
* virtual methods are used
* method is too big (approx > 32 bytes of IL code)
* complex control flow
* try/catch and try/finally is used
* local variables
* using structures (records) as arguments
Since the Fairmont Hotel was about 3 blocks away from the conference center, I decided to stay until I ate my lunch. After lunch, I headed back to my hotel room to put the finishing touches on my Reflection session.
My wife and I then went to Spiedo Ristorante, an Itailian Restaurant for dinner. Unfortunately, it took about 45 minutes to one hour to get our dinner. The food was very good though.
After dinner, I went back to the conference center to attend the Meet the .NET Team and learned that Kylix will not be updated in 2004. Sad news indeed. Other interesting tidbits is that dbGo/ADOExpress and WebSnap will not be in the first release of Delphi 8 for the Microsoft .NET Framework. The BDE will be ported, except for SQLLinks. About 40 .NET team members were present.
Following the Meet the .NET Team session, Borland held a Delphi 8 Launch Party. All sorts of deserts were available. Ice cream with lots of toppings, specially made cookies with icing that read: “Delphi 8 for .NET”. In addition, a big sheet cake was there. I talked with Lino for a while, then went back to the hotel to get some sleep.