Personal Outlook #2

Virtual Meetings
I enjoy attending virtual events, it's a good way to learn and share information.   It's one of the reason's I started the Virtual Delphi Users Group.   I am always on the watch for good virtual events.  I have multiple computers every place I code.   With a virtual event I typically start it on a secondary computer and stay coding.   If I hear something interesting I look at the second machine to see the details.   On occasion something really good is covered and I never get back to coding.

For the next VDUG meeting we had advertised covering Delphi Prism 2011.    I just found this event "Extreme Cross-platform .NET with Delphi 2011""  presented by David I.  Which is the week before the VDUG Meeting, and was going to cover nearly the same material.   Not wanting to just show the same thing, I am going to change the topic a bit.   So, I think everyone should attend the event with David I.  

As for the VDUG Meeting, I am now working on refining a deeper dive into the Delphi Prism Language Features.      With some of the things we have learned trying to keep some of our code cross-compiling with Delphi Win32.    When I get the material prepared I will announce the new meeting on the VDUG Site.

Another virtual event I found today that looks interesting is a 3 hour Virtual Conference with Kent Beck on Continuous Deployment.    Since I have enjoyed many of his books.   Most of the time virtual conferences by the media companies are so product specific that if you don't use the product it's a waste of time.   But this looks interesting and I think I can apply the topic to our situation.  Specifically we currently use FinalBuilder Server to monitor our SVN repository for changes, which when detected they are automatically built and deployed to our test environment.

Stackoverflow Code-Golf
On stackoverflow.com there is a tag called Code-Golf that contains challenges to the write the smallest program possible meeting the requirements of the challenge.   I took note of this question and answered it in Delphi.     It shows that you can do cryptic things in Delphi, just like you can in other languages.   I think it's a good example of why you should use descriptive variable names and types.      The answer was the ugliest code I have ever written.