Someone who attended two of my talks commented that my slides were different than the printed slides in the distributed book. I can understand that this may cause some confusion if you are trying to follow the slides through the book and take notes. Changing slides is a hard choice but sometimes necessary.

In my case I had a presentation on the whidbey base class libraries and another on Web Services Security with WSE2, a very new technology that we are still getting a deeper and deeper understanding of.

Whidbey is a moving target. I initially put together this presentation a year ago using the PDC bits. I modified it for a June conference to reflect  changes in the May CTP bits. I revised it once again with the Beta1 bits for the ASPConnections show. The powerpoint slides were submitted in early September  so that the books could be printed. Since then the October CTP bits were released and I updated the talk once again to incorporate a few goodies as well as add in a few new discoveries and to revise some information that had become clarified. I believe I mentioned this at the start of the talk and I think it’s beneficial  to have the presentation be as current as possible.

For the second presentation, again, I considered the effect of changing the deck and, again, decided it was beneficial after doing a “trial run” of the presentation in Montreal in October. The deck represented about a 2 hour talk (at minimum) and I had to make some tough choices about what details needed to go. (I’m very happy to learn that I will now get 3 hours to do this next time!) What I ended up doing was hiding some of the slides. Additionally in the months between the printing and now, I implemented WSE2 in a pre-existing production app and have spent a lot of time in the WSE newsgroup. I have learned a lot about some of the problems and confusion a programmer will come up against using this tool and I chose to add some of these valuable lessons to the presentation.

Although I did talk to some other speakers about this I wonder how people handle this when presenting – especially with new material.

I will be posting these new versions of the power point slides to my own website and I believe that the DevConnections site also has a place where I can share them. When I do so, I will make note of that here in my weblog.

Posted from BLInk!

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