Meet Me in Verona

I know that XE2 on Win64, OS/X and iOS is all the rage but some of us (or is it most of us?) still have to make living in the Win32 world. That’s why my ITDevCon 2011 talks are not focused into specific technologies but into techniques and tools that will make your life easier. (At least your life as a programmer, that is.)

If you have time and you live close enough, come to Verona at the end of October and meet many interesting people. Lots of speakers, three separate tracks, free lunch and wifi – what do you want more? David I is rumored to be there, Marco Cantù will lead sessions all the time and you’ll have a chance to talk to me. I’ll be giving four sessions, some targeted at beginners, some at experienced programmers. (All between those extremes are also invited, of course.)

Pleasures and pitfalls of profiling

Sometimes, our programs just don't run fast enough. When this happens, many programmers make a typical mistake - they start guessing where the bottleneck is and they optimize code here and there in a wild hope to find the real cause of the problem. There's, however, a much better way to finding the slow code - using a profiler. We'll take a look at different approaches to finding problematic spots in the program (logging, debugger, instrumenting profilers, sampling profilers) and we'll also visit the dark side - situations when profiling just doesn't help.

Refactoring in (and out of) Delphi

Refactoring tools offer a quick and simple way of safely modifying your code and making it more readable and maintainable. We'll take a look at refactoring tools provided by Delphi and some popular add-ons (MMX, Castalia) and explore all the functionality they offer.

Going functional

Functional programming is getting more and more popular. You may know why it is so, but did you also know that you can program "functionally" in Delphi? This talk will start with light introduction to functional programming, which will then evolve into discussion of anonymous procedures and generics. The goal is to show you some ideas on how those advanced tools can improve your programming skills and techniques.

Multithreading made simple with OmniThreadLibrary

This session will explain the basics of multithreading. In addition to explaining all pitfalls and good practices, the majority of the session will be spent in code, showing how to build simple multithreaded applications with the help of the OmniThreadLibrary multithreading library.