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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.

I went to Ray Konopka’s pre-conference tutorial on Creating Custom Components for the Microsoft .NET Framework. About 20 minutes into the session, a booming voice over the conference center p.a. system says “A fire has been reported in the conference center. Please evacuate the building using the nearest exit”. The fire alarm then sounds and everyone begins to leave the building.

In case you haven’t heard, Ray Konopka is now the President of ComponentScience, Lino Tadros’ .NET component company. Ray is going to continue to improve and support his Raize products (press release). Lino’s company has the Who’s Who of Delphi developers which currently include Charlie Calvert and Steve Teixeria.

Two minutes later, we are told that we could come back in the building. In the meantime, Ray is trying to figure out where he left off. Gathering his thoughts, he starts again. A couple of sentences later, Ray said “Well, I guess nothing else can go wrong”. Just after this comes out of his mouth, the fire alarm goes off again. Another voice comes back on and lets us know that we don’t need to leave again.

Ray kept his humor through this interruption and is a very good speaker.

After lunch, I attended the speaker meeting which kept me informed on my responsibilities and the logistics of the conference.

I snuck into Scott Ambler’s pre-conference tutorial (Agile Database Techniques) for a short time and he was very animated. Very good speaker. Highly recommended.

I stopped by the PILLAR booth in the Exhibit Hall and said hi to the guys. A little later, I walked through the rest of the Exhibit Hall. I talked with Lino Tadros, Ray Konopka, Jeroen Pluimers, Chad Howser and probably other people that I am forgetting.

Lino demonstrated a really cool product for ASP.NET. Basically, it was a web based calendaring system that is really impressive. More information can be found here.

After dropping my laptop off at the hotel, my wife and I went to the Opening Keynote. A couple of videos where shown that were slightly modified from the Matrix Reloaded. They pasted David I’s face over Neo’s face. Pretty funny stuff.

The Welcome reception was very good. In addition to all sorts of great food, they had a huge hall full of all sorts of games. Any casino game that you could think of, video games, X-Box games, pool tables, dart boards, slot machines and many others. It was a really big arcade game.

They had a live band and a dance area. However, not many people used the dance floor, since there wasn’t enough alcohol flowing. The party included two drinks per person.

Turning in your ticket for the Welcome Reception resulted in chips to use to play table games or coins for playing the slot machines. I tried my hand at BlackJack and did okay. Later on, I turned in my chips for some raffle tickets.

At the end of the evening, they pulled tickets for prizes. I was fortunate enough to win a $50 Circuit City gift certificate and a $50 SuperValue gift certificate! Woo hoo!

Afterwards we headed back to the hotel to get some much needed sleep.