Starting today, you can attend the CodeRage 2007 developer conference. It’s free, entirely virtual, and has some promising sessions for anyone wanting to keep up with what’s new for Delphi, Delphi for PHP and JBuilder. For some reason there are also sessions on Ruby; looks like CodeGear (a wholly-owned Borland subsidiary) is cooking something up here.

I like this idea. Conferences are part of IT culture, and I guess pros will always want to get together for real conferences, if only for the networking opportunities they present, along with the chance to collar the people who actually have the answers and grill them with your burning questions or complaints.

Even so, there is huge logic behind virtualizing conferences, especially bearing in mind the environmental cost of travel. The vendor gets access to a larger potential audience, and delegates have more flexibility over what content they view.

This one looks rather good.

Update

I’m seeing reports of connection problems, video breaking up and so on. Perhaps that’s the major downside of virtual conferences. On the other hand, this stuff ought to work by now. If CodeGear can’t scale its conference servers, that’s not a good advertisement for its technology.