MSDN Presentation and the Demo Gods

Everyone who has ever done a presentation in front of a large group of people, with a computer and powerpoint, will have some crack about appeasing the demo gods.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on LINQ for the MSDN Event here in Boise, and apparently I pissed the demo gods off something fierce.

I get up on stage, hook up my laptop, start everything up (powerpoint and VPC) plug in the projector's cable, and...
I hear a lot of beeping. I open Windows explorer and suddenly all of my icons start expanding to enormous proportions. My PowerPoint presentation will not move past the first slide.

I reboot. Restart PowerPoint and VPC. I hear beeping again. I'm supposed to have started 5 minutes ago. Not good.

I start talking anyway. LINQ has a lot to cover. Philosophy, data access, xml, objects, language enhancements, etc.

It is as I start talking, sans PowerPoint, that suddenly the crowd goes: "Ohhh", with a couple of faint "Doh!"s in the mix. My laptop had just Blue Screened.

The demo gods were not happy with me.

So, reboot again, and keep talking about LINQ. Needless to say I was a bit flustered this time, but I kept moving (I had a time limit). Luckily, my laptop booted just fine this time, everything loaded, I was able to breeze through a bunch of slides and get the VPC started and start the actual demo.

After that everything went mostly well. I covered all of my demos, and they all worked. I also knew which of my demos would take a long time to run, and used that time to ask the audience for questions -- and they had a lot. The biggest question to come up, repeatedly, had to do with the misconception that LINQ was only about database access. It isn't, LINQ is about data manipulation with ALL of your data.

The only thing I missed: each of my demos had two parts. Showing how things are probably being coded now, and then showing how they are done with LINQ. I skipped the first part, trusting the audience to believe me that they worked. I don't think that was a bad thing. They came to see new stuff, not old.

Anyway, I'll have to figure out what I need to sacrifice for the demo gods before I give another presentation.

And if anyone managed to get a picture of my blue screen, I would love to have a copy of it.

Start everything back up.

NetDug last week...

I thought this was funny.

Last week I gave a presentation on C# 3.0 and LINQ to NetDug. Mind you, this is a really well run group. We meet at the ProClarity ---erm Microsoft -- building in downtown Boise. Usually someone from Microsoft lets us in, guards over us, and things go really well. Not this time.

It started with one of the group leaders sending me an email, the day before the meeting, telling me that he could not get onto their server, ergo: they couldn't send an email to the group telling them that the meeting was on, and what we were talking about.

Not great, but I can work around that. I sent out a message to the BSDG group, which is also largely Boise area developers and told them. It is largely the same people anyway.

One day goes by.

OK, day of the meeting. I show up and there are already people there waiting outside the building. I'm early so I don't think much of it. The Microsoft building here in Boise is actually a nice spot. There is this cool little spot that had some places to sit in the shade with lots of trees, which was needed because it was over 80 degrees at the time. So we just sat there until someone was going to open the building for us.

Janitors walked in, a few people walked out. I even knew a few of them. It was getting really close to the time of the meeting so I started talking to one of them as they came out. Asking if certain people who are usually there to open the building for us are still in the building to open the building so we can have our meeting. (yes, that is a run on sentence, but appropriate since the person I talked to was a tech writer -- who taught tech writing). They were not there.

Great. First there is no email to tell anyone about the meeting we were supposed to have, and now we don't even have a room to have it in. This is getting better all the time.

By this time there were about eight people there. That is a small gathering for this group. It usually gets 20 people. But, they were still interested in what I had to show them. But we were outside, and my laptop is useless outside running on battery power -- so no power point. There are worse things in life than giving a talk with no power point, really. So next best option: wing it with a pen and paper.

This is where it is a good thing that there were only eight people there. So I started the meeting, outside, and started talking. One thing that does happen when giving a talk like this, you cut out all of the extraneously stuff.

Array initializers -- didn't talk about it.
Extension Methods -- yes, but just enough
Object and Collection initializers -- just barely
Expression Trees -- mentioned that I didn't know anything about them.

But we did talk quite a bit about the var keyword, anonymous types, LINQ, and Lambda. All via pen and paper (which I now refer to as the original Power Point).

So, obviously, I wasn't trying to get the attendees to really grok the material, but I think they did capture some of the general zen. Which, as far as I can tell, is to rethink how and when you use a for loop on a list. With LINQ and Lambda, we should be seeing a lot fewer of them.

In the process we also talked about PLINQ, XLINQ, DLINQ, LINQ for SQL, NHibernate, SubSonic, and Log4Net. It was a good meeting. Not bad for considering the circumstances.

Then to close off the evening for myself, my mom and brother were attending a dairy conference a few blocks away, so I snuck into there and bored myself to sleep. They were talking about whey futures (as in stock market like futures).

I thought I had given a reasonable presentation with no slides earlier, on the street, in 80 degree weather. Here was a guy giving a presentation inside, with a huge projector (20 foot screen - at least) to 50 people and doing it badly.

Now all of this comes from my own general preferences. There is an art to displaying lots of numerical data on a slide. There is also an art to showing charts on a slide. This guy knew about neither, and probably never read anything by Edward Tufte.

Note: I have read Edward Tufte, but please don't blame my bad slides on him -- they are my fault for not reading his books enough.

All of his slides were white. All of his text was black. There was no variation. They could have been printed on a black and white printer and no one would have known the difference. Imagine trying to decipher slide after slide filled with large grids of numbers, each row having a different type of number, and only a thin black line between them. Not good. Then to show emphasis on a particular number -- out comes the laser pointer.

I about made my brother buy me a beer after that. And dinner.

My mom did instead.

This is painful

There is just something painful about listening to the sound of your own voice. Almost as bad as having someone point out all of my grammatical mistakes. Then there is the added pain of watching yourself on video. You get to hear and SEE how goofy you really are.

Anyway, we recorded that last half of our BSDG meeting last Thursday where I was covering C# 3.0. The video misses all of the good stuff (like 'var', collection initializers, object initializers, extension methods, and such) and just focuses on LINQ and Lambda Expressions.

This being the web, there are far better sources of information than this video, but if you are really starved for information -- have at it.

Link to the video.

Rhino.Mocks Presentation

Here is the presentation that I gave on Rhino.Mocks for the West Michigan Day of .Net. Include the PowerPoint and the sample code.

One note: this is using the Adventure Works Lite database that can be found at CodePlex.

Download and be happy.

RhinoMockDemo.zip