My quiet (snowless boo hoo hoo) winter at home is winding down. Soon I will have to start tugging at the roots that have been deeply embedding me into my beautiful little place in the world and flit about the country …err continent, that is.

It all begins again in about a week.

April 3 – 6: DevConnections in Orlando (I have 1 talk at ASPConnections and 2 at VSConnections)

April 10: Not a trip, but I’ll be presenting at Vermont.NET!

April 11-13 – Maybe attend  Devscovery in NYC.

April 22: Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee.This will be new for me – a big one day user group event with myself and 4 other speakers that I am honored to be included with (Michele on Indigo, Scott Hanselman on ASP.NET seen through dasBlog, UI guru Jason Beres and ASP.NET book author Bill Hatfield)! I also get to spend a few days visiting a good friend.

May 2: Huntsville, AL to speak at the HUNTUG User Group run by Lori McKinney (an INETA event). I am looking forward to this as well, though I won’t be doing the usual INETA speaker visit to the nearby Space Museum. nor two attractions that are more up my alley: Cathedral Caverns State Park and Burritt Museum.

May 9-11: Montreal for DevTeach! Yay yay! One of my favorite conferences. It’s less than 3 hours from my house. Many of my friends are there as speaker and attendees and Montreal is beautiful in the spring! Then after that Alan Griver and Beth Massi are coming home with me for visit and Alan will be speaking at VTdotNET. Yay.

June – A whirlwind. I’m hoping to announce soon a Vermont Code Camp in early June. Then there’s TechEd and then I’m off on a 10 day trip that is a combined vacation and INETA tour (with my hubby) to the Atlantic Provinces in Canada. I have always wanted to go to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and have been eyeing the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick for years, as well. I will be visiting New Brunswick.NET, the .NET Nova Scotia and finally We Develop.NET in St. John’s Newfoundland.

The list goes on. I have a whole bunch of INETA gigs scheduled through September already and am talking with Thom Robbins about a possible mini-code camp, too.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Brad Abrams has a long list of credits for the folks who helped him create demos for this MIX session. When I was at TechEd last June, I saw a totally awesome demo in a WCF Reliablility session that also had some top talent at Microsoft involved in building the demo. The Microsoft demos for the Indigo overview talk that has been done a lot by Ari Bixhorn takes a truckload of equipment and even a mini support team to run (whereas I had some ho-hum console apps when I did that at TechEd South Africa). I spend a ridiculous amount of time on my demos  but will never have anything like the ones these guys get to pull off for their nice shiny sessions. Sheesh. 🙂

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Michele Leroux Bustamante has posted code samples from her sessions at SD West. The posts keep coming and coming. I think she did something like 40 sessions! Not really, but it looks like she did 5 regular sessions and 2 half day sessions. I do not know how on earth she manages that. It must be an IDesign thing, since Michele and Brian Noyes and Juval Lowy also do a zillion talks each at DevConnections.

Speaking of DevConnections – it’s only in 2 more weeks! April 2-5. I’ll be doing three talks this time, Advanced Data Access in ADO.NET 2.0, Building WSE 3.0 Secured Web Services that can talk to WCF and Five Supposedly Scary things in .NET. I have taken liberties with the actual session titles, but that’s the gist of it. There is going to be a lot of amazing content.

At the end of the month, Michele and I get together again, along with Jason Beres, Scott Hanselman and Bill Hatfield to present a full day of talks at Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee. This is a full day user group event put on by the WI.NET Users Group.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

This spring I will be heading out to speak at the fourth Deeper in .NET event that is hosted by the Wisconsin.NET user group. This is Scott Isaac’s first time coordinating it, as former group leader Brian Tinkler has gone to work for Microsoft.

This will be a one day event with 5 talks. Michele Leroux Bustamante will be (very appropriately) doing a session on WCF. Scott Hanselman, Rob Howard and Jason Beres (returning for his 4th year!) are also on the roster.

I’ll be doing a talk on ADO.NET 2.0 integration with SQL Server 2005. I could easily spend at least 1/2 of the entire day talking about that, but I will limit myself to my 90 minute slot.

An added benefit of going to Wisconsin is that I am going to spend a few extra days there visiting with a friend who I haven’t seen in too many years.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Susan Lennon picks me up in her BMW Z4 to speak at WeProgram.NET in Virginia Beach! Zoooom! (read more…)

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Many speakers have big problems with timing, especially in a conference setting when you cannot go long. Though I have practiced talks against a clock, this does not really help me when I’m in the session – if a question takes more time than I should have allowed or I ramble, then the time I took in practice means nothing. I’m sure other speakers have ways to deal with this, but I inadvertently came up with something on my own that helped me enormously last week and wanted to share it. It is probably not a new idea, but it worked well for me since I thought of it rather than trying to follow someone else’s suggestion.

I had ended up with one of the one hour session slots at the end of DevConnections for my WSE3.0 Overview talk and knew that posed a problem.

I looked at the powerpoint deck and divided the presentation up by topic. Then, off the top of my head, wrote down how many minutes I thought each topic (including demos) should take. Luckily, this added up to 55 minutes!

Then in a notebook (notebook is a tip I got from Ingo Rammer) I wrote down a name for each section and then, based on how long I thought the previous section should take, what time it should be when I started that section.

It looked like this:

The session was supposed to end at 3:45. I knew I was cutting it very close for Q&A, but since it was a short session, I told them at the beginning that we would not have a lot of time for Q&A and could continue it in the hallway or online afterward.

So this worked for me like a charm. I had my little travel clock right on top of the notebook and it was easy enough for me to remember to take a very quick look over there as I started each section to see how I was doing. In this way I was able to determine if I needed to speed up or if I was okay.

I wish I had come up with this prior to TechEd South Africa where we had one hour slots but were told to leave 15 minutes for Q&A, making the presentations only 45 minutes long. But now I know I can do this from now on and hopefully it will help someone else.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

If you are doing evals for sessions at DevConnections or any conference, comments are really helpful in addition to filling out the checkboxes. If you liked our talk – what did you like about it? If you didn’t like it – it is extremely useful to know why! The same goes for the other questions that are asked, such as about presentation skills. The goal is to always improve… as it benefits everyone …  so metadata (even if it is not love) is very helpful!

Posted from BLInk!

I plan to show off this mega visualizer in my Debugger Visualizer session today as well as the DateTime visualizer that John Mueller wrote for his DevSource article.

Posted from BLInk!

I will be doing a session on Tablet PC development at GUVSM.NET on December 12th. This is sponsored by the MSDN Canada Speaker Bureau. A beautiful time of year (though perhaps a wee bit frigid) to visit a beautiful city. I plan to stay an extra day to see the Provence exhibit at the museum of Fine Arts.

Posted from BLInk!

This is an attempt to alleviate a problem that I have had a few times when presenting. Even though I check the time constantly during my talk (and will be using a travel clock from now on rather than my watch – great tip from Kate Gregory and also they were provided for us at TechEd), I have, on a few occasions gotten so involved with the talk that I couldn’t even remember what time it started or when it was supposed to end. Stupid, right? Hey, let’s just call it “passion”! You should be thrilled that I am so enthralled, eh? 🙂

Well, since I am aware that this is a problem, rather than just saying “well, that’s silly, I can remember next time” I have a better plan of attack!

 No, they are not glued to my laptop. Just laid out on top of it for the photo op.