I arrived in Tokyo this week to do some early briefings around Delphi 2005 (aka Diamondback), the same week that Typhoon Tokage arrived. I spent a couple of days briefing journalists from the major Developer magazines in Japan, but given that the launch of the Japanese version of Delphi 2005 lags behind the English edition by a little while, we chose to do the public events a little differently. As Arisawa-san pointed out in his blog, Japan are holding full launch events later in November, however this time we invited select members of the Delphi community in for a briefing. These are guys who run User Groups, run online Forums, publish Japanese Delphi magazines, etc. In other words, the kind of enthusiastic community members that Borland is blessed with all around the world, and this was, we thought, a small way we could try and repay that enthusiasm.

We had scheduled this event for Wednesday night, which it turns out was the same time when Tokage was due to hit Tokyo. As cool as we think Delphi 2005 is, we thought that maybe people may not want to come out to a Delphi event just as a 800km-wide Typhoon descended directly on Tokyo, we contacted the invited people and offered to run it on Thursday night instead. Some took us up on the offer, but amazingly, a surprising number were willing to brave the Typhoon in order to get a first look at Delphi 2005 in Japan!

So, if these guys are willing to risk it, who am I to say no, so as rain flew horizontally past the window, flood levels rose, and much destruction was wrought elsewhere in Tokyo, we had a group of guys sitting watching my demos and getting very excited about what they were seeing. To say it was surreal is an understatement. These guys are so hardcore! We’ll run it again tonight, but so far this has been the most memorable part of the Delphi 2005 launch. Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Korea in the next few weeks will have to raise the bar in order to top that!