Here we go...


Edinburgh, Scotland, 28th September

Attendees at VFP session: 18 (my estimate: around 8% of total attendees).

Overall I found the DevDay very enlightening, without too much slick salesmanship (which was refreshing).

The introductory video from yer man Bill was good, along with the demos - although the applause from the video audience every so often made me cringe (along with others I suspect): must be a cultural thingy.

The Scottish Regional bloke (sorry, Keith, can't remember the full title) stressed VFP as the middle tier tool of choice especially for reporting / wharehousing and pointed out the basis of ADO, etc., plus VFP's sheer speed.

[Interestingly, on my way out of the introduction, the person behind me stated that they'd changed their mind and would now be going along to see what VFP was all about, and the one in front likewise. Neither of these indicated they were currently developing n-tier solutions in the show of hands during the introduction. Nosey, aren't I?]

The VFP session was good plus I was interested to actually SEE some other Scottish developers - a rare breed.

Emphasis here was strongly on the Web development features with explanations of the Fat- and Thin- client models/implementations: I think I'm now even more confused over which route to take for data access / web-clients - I'm suffering from ADO (Acronym Definition Overload) I think: [opinions welcomed...on data access rather than my mental health].

A lack was no real mention of integration with the rest of VS6 - possibly this was just taken for granted.

General amusement when he showed the venue for the Palm Springs meeting - bit of a taxi ride from Edinburgh I'm afraid.

The Visual InterDev session was packed - probably everyone was there. The presenter was knowledgable and extremely clear: 5/5/5 on my ratings. His recommendation seemed to be to use ADO for data access along with COM objects (I think??!!).

MS seem to be particularly proud of the ability to debug client and (remote) server scripts / objects and having recently been playing with PWS and FoxISAPII I can see why.

Rational made a presentation during the lunch-time break: very disappointing, little more than an overview of the company. I would really like to have had a session on the modelling tools in VS6 as opposed to the Visual J++ sessions which occupied much of the rest of the day.

Windows CE had an additional session at the end - didn't attend but there seemed to be a lot of interest - especially with Adaptive Server Anywhere now available, with synchronisation, etc., to central site(s).

Finally, the goodie bag:-
NT 5 server and client (both BETA), Office 2000 Beta, SQL Server 7 (BETA), CD with all the presentations, A CD on n-Tier development, 120-day evaluation copies of NT4 and the e-commerce gubbins...very good value, especially as it's possible to get IIS for free too.

Result - I'll be buying VS6 Enterprise (...The Next Generation?). Hmmm...maybe the sales pitches were slicker than I thought...

Thanks, as ever, for letting me ramble on.

RJL