Alain ("Lino") Tadros - What a Legend!

The Australian Delphi Users Group (ADUG) and Borland Australia managed to bring acclaimed international Delphi/.Net Guru, Lino Tadros to Australia for a series of .Net Workshops.

Lino is President and CEO of Falafel Software and a Borland Certified Developer & Trainer on Delphi, C++Builder, Kylix and JBuilder and was honored with Borland's prestigious "Trainer of the year" award at BorCon in 2002.

Lino came to Adelaide after first doing workshops in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and spent most of his Friday on the 21st November 2003 doing a presentation on .Net as he sees it.

The Adelaide ADUG committee should be proud that they were able to bring together such a large group of attendees with  over 60 people coming to the University of Adelaide for the workshop. This was definitely the highest attendance of all the states, in proportion with the population of each state. Well Done ADUG - Adelaide and Well Done! Adelaide! It was great to see so many developers in one workshop.

From 9:00am to 5:30pm Lino puts heaps of effort into his workshop with a good overview of topics from introductory (thank goodness)  through to more technical areas - with enough technical detail to help us see why we should be using .Net. In true "Lino" fashion he mixed in good humour to help maintain that level of audience attention and enthusiasm for the very full day.

We did get to see a lot of 'Live Code' and working examples, in a sneak preview of Delphi 8. Some times Lino had to change to other more mature development platforms to show what he was talking about as he was using  the preview version of Delphi 8 with a release date sometime in December this year, and it was still a little bit buggy. Lino assured us that it will be fine by the time it is released. We were happy to see the examples working, and also how easy it was to move between development platforms with the main result being .Net output.
Some of us were surprised to hear how .Net will be so important to the next major version of Windows to be released in 2006, and this had us thinking that we "need" to look at it now.

We are looking forward to the Delphi 8 final release and most attendees appear to be talking about taking up Borland's generous upgrade path.

Why is Lino a "Legend", when we heard about his "Whirl-Wind" tour of the world doing this ".Net Workshop" we could not believe the amount of time he has spent on the road, over 40 days already and a different town every day.
Not to mention it was a quick trip home and then off to London to continue the tour.

What can we say - but "Thank You!"  to this crusader of the .Net future, Great job! "Lino" - Well Done!

I think most of us  went away feeling "Excited!" and that "We really had to try .Net for ourselves".

Link to ADUG info on the .Net Workshop to see more detail of what Lino had to stay.
Below are some photos to enjoy from the day!
 

Thanks Lino for being so generous on the day! - Peter Herriman 

Some extra notes:

On reading the messages on the ADUG message list I think most people who attended were very happy they did and would definitely attend any other that Lino might present.

Lino said that it was his first trip to Australia and he has really enjoyed it. He said he would come back to Australia for a bit longer next time, let's hope so! We look forward to it

These photos and more were taken by Peter Herriman - if you want one - please email me