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.
2 comments:
Nice...
It's more like the demo devils -- running visual studio 2008 on vista in a virtual pc on a laptop -- that's doomed to slowness. In this case I think static slides would have been faster and let you cover more topics (that's what the MS guy did.) Another thing you can try is to show a screen capture video of a demo visual studio session. Sort of like the video on the subsonic site, but with live narration.
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