It’s talk like a pirate day!

Arrr, so ye be wantin' t' go to sea an' ye don't be wantin' t' end up in Davy Jones' Locker. Then ye best be learnin' t' be talkin' like a buccaneer.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

Nordic PowerBuilder Seminars

There will be PowerBuilder seminars in the Nordic countries as follows:

Oslo, Norway - September 18
Stockholm, Sweden - September 19
Copenhagen, Denmark - September 20th

Key speaker will be John Strano and the agenda includes; roadmap, 10.5, demo of App Server PlugIn etc etc. If you are interested in attending and have not received anything from Sybase then drop them a line at europepb_nospamremove@sybase.com
Remove the _nospamremove from the email address before sending....

Special Event

I did get some feedback on the Special Event. Actually, the hit of the night was apparently SyberJam



A band composed of Sybase employees and TeamSybase members. The played during the pre-event while the food was being served.
The main event was Penn and Teller. Here's some photos of them from after the event.



Photos are courtesy of Paul Horan. Here's one last one of his, a view of the pools at Ceaser's from his room.

Thursday’s Sessions

Services are the keys to reuse

My last session. Jeff Pryslak was doing most of the talking, I was just the "demo doll" (the guy showing the live example). Only suffered a minor piece of demo curse this time. I deployed a component and forget to recycle the server, so the component crashed intermittently during that portion of the demo. Everything else ( including live calls to the Amazon and eBay web services ) worked fine. Quite a few poeple in attendance.

Wednesday’s Session

Advanced DataWindow.Net

Start off first thing in the morning with the Advanced DataWindow.Net class that I'm assisting Dave Fish with. Somewhat of a mixed bag, Dave did a lot of discussion of the new features from PowerPoints. One of the Sybase engineers responsible for the ongoing development of the Web DataWindow did those demos, and so was able to speak to great detail about how it operated. Dave then showed the DataWindow Designer plug-in for Visual Studio. One of the engineers responsible for it's development was also in attendance. Unfortunately, that demo didn't work that well (not suprisingly considering it was a pre-alpha build).

Tuesday’s Session

I was still proctoring the PB 10.5/PB 11 new features class. Unfortunately, the instructor created the PB 11 demo code using a post-beta 1 build of PB11, and the machines in the lab had beta 1 builds. So the lab machines couldn't run the demos. To correct that, the instructor downloaded an even more recent post-beta 1 build, which resulted in the machines failing differently, but failing nonetheless to run the samples. Other than that, the session went well. The issue of demos not going well seem to be a re-occurring theme.

Tuesday's after lunch dessert was served in the exhibit hall. Once again, it seems an effective means of ensuring the people visited the exhibit hall. I think it also made the environment more relaxed as well.

Tuesday’s Keynotes

Data keynote

Raj Nathan discussed data as the foundation of business, and how that data needed to be unwired from applications so the right data can be delivered to the right point at the right time. Another Customer Panel (Scott Smith - ComScore, Ron Hauper - EMC, Scott Denmark - AOL, Staffan Skogby - Ericsson) then discussed their successes in data management and their needs for the future. Ifran then discussed the roadmap for the data management products and Rob V. did a demo of cluster failover.

Mike Harold, ISUG President, and Raj then presented the ISUG awards. This year the awards were based on votes from ISUG Journal readers voting for their favorite articles. In the database category, the award went to Jeff Wallman. In the tools category there were two winners as a result of a tie: Ken Howe and Paul Vero.

Tools keynote

Bill Jacobs introducted the session. Then Raj discussed the roadmap for tools products. John Strano did a demonstration of the XAML DataWindow. Dave Dichman discussed plans for PowerDesigner and the latest version was demoed. Jonathan Baker then discussed the plans for Workspace and Jeff Pryslak did a demo of the latest version. Bill then finished the session by noting that Sybase has opened up a blogs section where a number of the key people in the database and tools sections are posting.
Photos are here.

Video of the demonstrations are here.