I always enjoy the ESUG talks, and this year was no exception.  Right away on Monday morning, we witnessed some excellent and interesting presentations, and they were from Cincom customers.

Here are some highlights from ESUG 2012:

• Carsten Harle described a GUI web testing framework and its impressive and successful use.
• Maikel and Elke from MediaGenix described their business and their development process, including continuous integration.  The process looks well-thought-out, and it has some impressive benefits. The structuring of MediaGenix’s product seems to leverage Smalltalk capabilities very well for the benefit of their product and their customers.
• Innovation awards.  Smalltalk is all about innovation, so this is always a welcome part of ESUG.  I was also glad to see several projects working in Cincom Smalltalk.
• Georg Heeg eK was recognized for its 25^th anniversary of Smalltalk business!  I am glad this was recognized—congratulations!
• My Cincom Smalltalk product roadmap was done with a Tour de France theme to help make it fun and interesting.  I enjoy doing these presentations because we have so much going on in our product development (watch the video below).
• The “Building a Business” presentation I did with Dirk Verleysen went very well.  It was nice to show how to use Smalltalk and our tools to easily create software to support a small business.
• Visualizations of performance profiling work by Alexandre Bergel.
• Many more!

Another important part of ESUG is simply the opportunity to have conversations and exchanges of ideas with other Smalltalkers.  For me (product manager), sitting down and talking with customers, partners and Cincom engineers was worth the trip alone—it was all good!