December 21st, 2004: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. Let me wish the world a year with fewer wars, and peace and prosperity to your families.
December 21st, 2004: I'm indeed teaching a Delphi 2005 Workshop in my home town, Piacenza, Italy, in English language on Jan 26th and 27th, followed by one day (almost free) seminar with Geoff Harris of Nexus Database Systems. Workshop prices start at 600€ for easy sign up. Follow this link for all of the details.
November 6th:: With Delphi 2005 very close to release (already at RTM stage) I'm setting up in-depth technical seminars to introduce all of the features of the new version, particularly the Win32 ones. I'll run this seminar in Italian language at the Workshop Delphi 2005 early December. I'm also planning an English language, 3 days, in-depth seminar on Delphi 2005 (an anticipation of my forthcoming Mastering Delphi 2005 book) around middle January. It will be held in my town, Piacenza in the north of Italy. Stay tuned for more details, feel free to email me right away if you are interested.
October 21st - There will be a Mastering Delphi 2005:
As you certainly already know, Borland has officially announced the new version of Delphi, called Delphi 2005.
Not surprisingly, I'm actively working on a new book on this new
product, that will probably be called Mastering Delphi 2005, although
the title is not finalized.
The book will cover the new product, both the Delphi for .NET personality and the Delphi for Win32
personality. I don't expect to have any space to discuss the C#
personality. As Win32 is till strong in Delphi I'll devote quite some
space to it, but as .NET is new it needs its stake of chapters. My
focus, though, will be Delphi specific.
I don't intend to provide reference material to the .NET Framework
Class Library, as there is already plenty of it, even if in other
programming languages like C#. Instead, I'll try to focus mostly on
Delphi specific technologies, starting with the language and the RTL,
and progressing with features like VCL.NET, the Borland Data Providers,
and so on. I'm still not sure how much space I'll devote to enterprise
features like ECO II, but at least I'll introduce them.
The book is not expected any time soon, as I still have to write most of it, and this takes time (I mean, months).
But it is definitely coming, after I've skipped Delphi 8. And, before I
forget, from what I've seen at the Borland Conference this might as
well be the best new version of Delphi since Delphi 1, with plenty of new language and IDE features, among others. Delphi 2005 (formerly known as Diamondback) looks really a must-have upgrade, and I hope I can join it with a must-have book covering it.
Stay tuned to this site for info on the product and on the book.
September 12th: I'm at the Borland Conference right now, and even if I'm not blogging, I'm posting info and pictures from the conference almost in real time. I'll add more stuff daily, or even hourly if I can manage that: keep an eye on my Borcon2004 Pictures Log. OK, I'll get a blog, I promise.
August 20th: The Borland Conference 2004 in San Jose (September 11th to 15th) will feature presentations of the new version of Delphi (DiamondBack) including one by me covering the ToolsApi. I'm also speaking on efficiency in strings, string lists and similar data structures in both Win32 and .NET. If you plan attending the confeerence, stop by to one of them to say "hi"...
August 20th: I've udpated my Cantools Wizards for Delphi 7.1.
July 14th: I've updated to version 0.04 the free Delphi 8 for .NET language chapter of Essential Delphi 8 for .NET. At this point I'm not sure if the ebook will be completed, stay tuned to the section of my newsgroup devoted to books for updates.
July 9th: I've ordered the new Delphi for .NET book by Xavier Pacheco and I've also added it to my online bookshop. I'll let you know my opinion as I get it and have some time to read it... but given the past track of the author it should be a very good book. Update on the 16h: Got the book yesterday, seems very nice: it it mostly geared towards .NET, with limited coverage of Delphi compatibility (RTL, VCL) but there is a lot of stuff in it!. There is also an interesting thread on the book on the Borland newsgroup.
June 17th: If you don't have a blog you are noone on the web, these days... so I'm really looking for alternatives and might have to write some code, but will have a personal blog up and running shortly...
June 16th: My company, Wintech Italia Srl, has a new web site at the address www.wintech-italia.it. The content completely in Italian and the site is devoted to my training and consulting business. I do have some related info (a little outdated I have to say) in English on this site in the Training page.June 16th: Our Italian conference was nice. Having David I in Italy was great. You can see pictures at www.delphiedintorni.it/geoxml/delphiday/photo.htm.
May 20th: Like in the past two years, I've set up an Italian Delphi Conference (called Delphi Day) in cooperation with Borland Italy. The event will take place in Piacenza (Italy) on the 9th and 10th of June, and will see presentations of David Intersimone and Jason Vokes of Borland, but also myself and other Delphi experts. Most of the talks will be in Italian, that's why the web page is not available in English. Still, David I will speak in English, so if you are in the area you might consider to come anyway.
May19th: My Delphi newsgroups front end, delphi.newswhat.com, now hosts also a few RSS feeds including Borland R&D members blogs, as you can see in the home page.
April 2nd: Download a free chapter of the forthcoming Essential Delphi 8 for .NET by Marco Cantù. The 40-pages chapter (in PDF format) covers the new features of the Delphi language and although it is still an unfinished draft it is already quite valuable.
April 1st: Waiting to have more time for a complete redesign, I've done a face-lift to the site.
March 23rd: OK, this is now almost official. The bad news is that there won't be a Mastering Delphi 8 for .NET. The good news is that I'm writing a Delphi 8 ebook. If nothing changes, I'll sell it for a limited fee. In any case you'll be able to get a large chapter (covering the many changes to the Delphi language) for free. Stay tuned to this site for a formal announcement in the next few days, along with the availability of the first draft of the free chapter!
March 19th: I'm teaching a 2-days seminar on Delphi 8 for .NET. If you come to Italy yourself, you can get it for a fair price (if I have to travel you'll have to pay some more). More info on content and prices in the Delphi 8 Workshop page.
February 12th 2004: After some struggle, I've moved my newsgroups to a new server. You can reach them with the same user name and password used in the past at the domain news://news.delphiedintorni.it. The English areas hosted on the server now use the prefix "marcocantu.com" (instead of "public").