In just over six years, Miller Freeman's Software Development conference has moved from the hallways of a San Francisco hotel to the expansive confines of the San Jose Convention Center. And while big isn't always better, there's little question that the SD conference remains the premier assemblage for PC and workstation programmers.
According to those who know--San Jose cab drivers, in this case--more than 20,000 attendees were expected at SD '94. What all these programmers came to see was an exhibit hall packed with the latest in software-development tools. What they came to hear were experiences and tips from fellow programmers, in discussions ranging from designing cross-platform applications to examinations of e-mail APIs.
On the software front, more than 100 new tools (or updated versions of old ones) were announced. Among those tools that caught our eye were Inmark's zApp Factory, an environment for building zApp applications, Phar Lap's FrontRunner, a Windows desktop that provides, in effect, an improved DOS box; NuMega's Bounds-Checker32/NT; and Metrowerks' CodeWarrior environment for PowerPC development. Certainly, Apple, with its PowerPC development tools, was a newcomer to the conference--and a major attraction. Other announcements of note include Watcom C/C++ Version 10.0 which provides a multiplatform GUI IDE, Quantasm's Pentium Optimizer for analyzing assembly-language code, and Mainstay's VIP-C and VIP-BASIC visual-programming environments for creating Macintosh and PowerPC apps.
It was no surprise that there was a heavy bias towards C++ in the conference and tutorial sessions. Among those presenters familiar to Dr. Dobb's readers were Al Stevens, who gave a session on "C++ Class Design," Dan Saks with "Generic Containers and Templates in C++," Pete Becker with "C++ and Multithreaded Applications," Hank Shiffman on "Making the Move to C++," and Tom Keffer, who spoke on "Making the Best Use of C++ Exceptions." Interestingly, there was also a conference track on Macintosh-related development issues--Newton, PowerPC, OpenDoc, and the like. Likewise, other tracks examined OS/2, UNIX, Windows (including Chicago and Cairo), and client/server.
