As I will be doing a talk at the Windows Anywhere conference (InDepth Tablet PC Web Development) which is in tandem with VSLive 2005 San Francisco, that means I’ll get to go to Indigo Day (except of course during the time I am doing my tablet session). That is something I’m excited about.
($300 discount if you register before Dec 8th)
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Now I see why Betsy’s posts are such gems!
“…when I was an MFA poetry graduate student…” from her latest blog post: My Text is not My Own
She is evidence of what makes the fabric of Microsoft so interesting. I think it would be a true bore if the company were made up of nothing by Comp Sci nerds (says this History major who spent most of her time in the art studio).
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I love talking to the Vermont.NET user group! These are my friends. It feels a lot more like teaching and sharing than presenting at a conference with a strict time limit to a group of people that may or may not like your presentation style and may or may not understand that you are there because you really truly want to help them understand something that is hard.
Tonight I spent 3 hours doing my WSE talk which is really two talks. Since our meeting is 6-9, this wasn’t a bad thing. They were warned! Though not everyone lasted the whole 3 hours – I’d say 1/2.
First it is a whole presentation explaining the tools of security. The second part is an introduction to WSE2 along with explanation of some of the problems you may run into when you are not working in a perfect text book setting. It’s a little hard doing it at night since I myself started to get a little tired, but I kept checking, they wanted the brain dump so that’s what they got. It was really really fun and I know I really helped a good bunch of the people there. I got to answer every question that anyone had (it was a small group) which is something that you just cannot afford to do in a conference talk. There were a few questions that went a little deeper than my knowledge goes, but I answered with what I could and we decided to dig up the rest another time.
Even if I have to do it as two separate talks, I always want to do these together.
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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.
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Of the four nights we were at the Mandalay Bay for DevConnections, Kathleen Dollard and I ate Sushi at the same restaurant three of those nights. on the last night we got a few of our pals to come along!
That’s Mark Michaelis, Richard Grimes, Dave Sussman, Don Kiely, Kathleen, Me & Chan Ouyang, from Philadelphia, who was one of the attendees.
Posted from BLInk!At the closing session of DevConnections there was a jam packed auditorium of attendees and a panel of a host of speakers up front. Carl Franklin ran around the room (literally 🙂 ) with a mike so people could ask questions. A larger percent of the questions were SQL Server related as that is the focus of one of the three conferences that make up DevConnections. There were a few questions about .NET, such as the future of the application blocks (which, by the way, is two-fold: much of what was learned in the app blocks is being folded into VS 2005 and they are also going to be part of Enterprise Services).
Yet one consultant stood up and asked an interesting business question. While there is so much push from Microsoft and from all of us who are excited about the new technologies, he is in a very familiar position. His clients’ VB6 programs run their businesses. They use SQL 2000. Everything works great. He said that his clients are afraid that he will push them to the new technologies which would be a great expense for them, even though their current systems more than suit their needs. What’s a guy (or girl) to do? He was looking for advice in handling this issue.
I have a client that was very happy on their VB6 apps and SQL 7 for a long time. I have been very fortunate that they trust my choices and although I continue to make minor changes to their enterprise VB6 application, every new piece of development in the past 2 1/2 years has been in .NET. This did not cost them anything extra since I spent my own time learning and experimenting. There are even pieces of their application that I have not charged them for, such as implementing WSE2 in one of the production apps. My ability to make these choices has also paid off in a very visible way with the use of a smart client application with a web services back end which solved a problem we had talked three years ago about solving with a very expensive T1 line to one of their satellite offices.
I have not leveraged anything new in SQL 2000 so that they were not forced to spend the large chunk of cash to upgrade from SQL7. This summer, it was discovered that their server had been hacked and in a quick build of a new server, the sysadmin chose Windows 2003 server which meant we had to move to SQL 2000. The 6 month trial was a saving grace in the emergency, but I know the client did more than grimace when those 6 months were up. Now they are asking me about SQL 2005 and Longhorn so that they can start planning ahead for the expense of upgrading all of their systems. I promised them that I have no plans to implement any of the sql 2005 features any time soon in their applications and that if I do find that I have a very strong business case for doing so, there would be plenty of time to prepare for the financial hit.
So, back to the guy at the conference with his question – how will Microsoft support HIM in working with his clients to make these decisions and to assure his client that he is not needlessly costing them money? He is in a rough place. One of the biggest reasons I left FoxPro years ago was because I was sick of defending it to potential clients who thought that Microsofot was going to bury it. This developer wants to learn and be proficient with the new tools. He also wants to keep his clients happy and to be a good consultant to them by helping them make the right choices and protecting them from unnecessary expenditures.
It’s an interesting question. I agree that there should be something that Microsoft can do to help him, but it has to be to help give *his* clients the best advice but not scaring them into moving everything to the latest and greatest technologies so that they can sell another server license.
Kathleen and I talked about this and I think it also fits somewhere in the conversation that Joel Spolsky began (or perhaps just raised to new heights) in his article about the API Wars. I expect to see more on this discussion in the near future.
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A quick post from Las Vegas! I’m at DevConnections in the incredible Mandalay Bay, there are, I believe, about 1500 attendees which is phenomenal.
This year I am in the fortunate position of being a speaker which means getting to hang out in the speaker lounge where we are all working on our talks!
I had the best luck this morning to have sitting across from me, Durga, who just happened to own a pieceof .Net2.0 that I hare been very confused about. He even had a demo of what I was trying to do. So after seeing his demo, I finally was able to fix my demo on that class! (and then share it with others.) the conversations in here are amazing so its a lot of fun!Of course I want my talks to be perfect, but I also want to go to some of the great talks that are going on today and the Next few days. There are a few Burlington people here, too, which is always a big treat for me!
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Sorry, still laughing about Scott Guthrie’s OOF TLA PPS post from yesterday. It’s about midnight. I have to get up at 4am. But of course, that requires going to bed first. I’m off to Las Vegas for ASPConnections although I’m going a little early as Kathleen Dollard and I are going to drive out to Zion National Park for a few days. Hopefully we’ll get back in time for the big Dot Net Rocks party on Saturday night.. It’s supposed to snow here tomorrow!
In case I haven’t mentioned it yet (ha ha) I’m doing 3 talks. Web Service Security for Dummies with WSE2.0 (which will be a nice precursor to Michele Leroux Bustamante’s Advanced WSE2 talk), What’s new in the .NET 2.0 Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers and Developing Ink Enabled ASP.NET Applications. There will also be a TechEd Cabana like hangout which I’m looking forward to. But mostly looking forward to geeking out for days on end with lots of friends (old and new). Awww shucks.
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