Meeting OSItalia 2016: summary and pictures

I’ve been invited to give a talk during the OSItalia Meeting 2016, a two day event held in Bologna on May 26-27 (I was there the last day).

OSItalia is a company who use Delphi to build and maintain a product named OS1, a management software that then is verticalized by partners into many business areas.

I am always very happy to meet other Delphi developers and as usual this annual event was quite crowded with 40-50 developers attending.

Meeting OSItalia 2016, Bologna

My 2 hours session covered the following topics:

Delphi 10.1 Berlin: What’s new
Delphi as a modern language
TFrameStand and MARS-Curiosity
V!ktor: a success case of a Delphi mobile app

Among other speakers there were some by OSItalia company (Paolo Bresci, David Lastrucci, Riccardo Lotti and Alberto Soave), some other speakers by partners companies and Andrea Benedetti (Microsoft Italia) who gave an interesting session about Microsoft SQL Server 2016 features.

Andrea Benedetti (Microsoft), David Lastrucci (OSItalia), Andrea Magni

During my session (on Friday) I was able to show some demos about Berlin’s new features, specifically:

the new TAddressBook component (a great addition given mostly all business apps need some interaction with contacts). The feeling is the support provided is very good in quality (access to contact’s images and details, read and write capabilities, an event to handle changes to the contact’s list…)
the ListView Item Designer (very appreciated since customizing listviews was a bit tricky and had no design time support before Berlin)
the floating form designer
the FireUI Live Preview (real time preview, on multiple platforms, of your FMX forms while you are still designing)
productivity features like the Bookmark Stack, the Selection Expansion (Ctrl+W) and method toxicity metrics.

Also, I spent some time talking about the new installer, the FMX Style Designer changes, the new RAD Server product, ThingPoint technology and other minor topics.

The second part of my session was a reminder about the powerful features that make Delphi a modern language, including generics, anonymous methods, attributes and RTTI.

The third part of my session was dedicated to TFrameStand (FMX Frames) and to MARS-Curiosity (REST Library) but I had to hurry up a bit because I really wanted to reserve some time to my last topic: V!ktor, a success case for Delphi mobile development.

It was a pleasure to showcase some of the valuable new features of Delphi 10.1 Berlin and also to cover some very popular area of interest like UI and usability of mobile apps.

I want to thank again organizers and attendees for the kind hospitality and I hope to come back again next year! And thanks to Marziano Massei of Computer Systems di Lanciano for the clean pictures.