Posted by: Paul Lefebvre
I didn’t attend a lot of sessions this year. A good amount of sessions were repeats from prior years or beginner-level. But that’s OK, because it gave me plenty of time to chat with other people and do the “networking” thing. I got and handed out lots of business cards 
Obviously, I attended the sessions for which I was presenting These were:
Unit Testing
This session was very well attended and I think it went well. The sessions were all about an hour long, so I try to break my presentation up with 20 minutes of slides, 20 minutes of REALbasic code demos and 20 minutes of group discussion. That worked really well for this session. I got to give an overview of unit testing in general, show how to use RBUnit wth REALbasic and then had lots of good discussion from everyone.
Afterwards, Joe and I talked about some updates for RBUnit to allow it to run automatically when your app starts and only display the UI if there are failures. I think this is a great idea and something I’m going to look into.
Also, Chris Little’s team at Renaissance Learning updated RBUnit to use delegates (replacing RBScript). He provided me with the code, so I’m going to take a look at that as well. I’m not too familiar with delegates, but it they might be a good alternative for introspection especially for those that are no yet using REALbasic 2008.
REALbasic Community
This session was well attended, primarily with folks new to REALbasic and REAL World. In fact, there were a lot of new folks at REAL World this year, which is a very good thing.
I covered what I do as community evangelist and then talked about the plethora of places on the internet where you can go to get information. Then we switched to Safari and actually checked a lot of the sites.
In addition, have created a new Community page here at RBDevZone for these community links.
I’ll be continuing to update this with more links as I find them so be sure to check back often!
Migrating from VB to REALbasic
Surprisingly, this session was not well attended. I thought there would be a lot of people that might be interested in this, but it seems I was wrong. Anyway, I pretty much gave an overview similar to the article about this that I wrote for REALbasic Developer Magazine. I then switched to a demo of VBConvert! by AYB Computers. The people there seemed generally interested in both the tool and the topic, so we had some good discussions as well.
Other sessions
I did attend a few other sessions as well. On Wednesday, Brad Rhine’s Cross-Platform Interface Tips was interesting and I picked up a couple things.
On Thursday, I attended two of Marco Bambini’s sessions on REAL SQL Server: Packaging REAL SQL Server in Your Apps and New Features in REAL SQL Server 2008 Release 2. Both were filled with lots of useful information. The next version of REAL SQL Server appears to be a very significant upgrade in both features and performance improvements.
I also attended Jonathan Monroe’s session on using ODBC with REALbasic. I knew that the a lot of new features had been added to the ODBC plugin in the past year or so, but it was good to see some practical examples for how they might be used.
On Friday, I (and most everyone else, it seemed) went to Brad and Joe’s session on Yuma. Yuma looks incredibly cool and I’ll be writing a separate blog post about it later. The last session of the day I attended was Nathan Regener’s Build Process session. Nathan is the build engineer for REAL Software. He was very funny and open about REALbasic build processes. He showed us all how they are using continuous integration (very cool) and talked about both general topics and specific things he would like to change. Such transparency is always appreciated and I think it helps create a better connection with the community.
Other Posts about REAL World 2008
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