dll Hell .net

In early December. I followed up my Code Camp presentation with a talk on the Castle project. The presentation was also for the Fairfield / Westchester .NET User Group. Though I had been committed as a speaker for about three months, I wasn’t able to start preparing the presentation until the weekend before I spoke. In addition to learning to be a presenter, I’ve been learning about over-committing myself…

Preparing
Having recently finished converting a five years old classic ASP based portal site to run on the Castle stack, I felt ready to ramble about my experience. Filling ninety minutes seemed a trivial task. As I sat down to write the presentation, it became clear to me that I had my work cut out for me. Castle is a broad topic. I ruled out IoC, which still left me with MonoRail and ActiveRecord and indirectly with NHibernate and NVelocity.

My Code Camp slides having been too sparse, I was determined to make these slides full of samples and content. My intent when I presented was to use the slides as a guide for me, but to lead the audience through a number of coding demonstrations in VS.NET. As I started nearing twenty-plus slides on MonoRail alone, I knew I was heading for a content crunch, having to choose what was essential and what could be glanced over. Features such as View Components and business object validation demonstrate the power of MonoRail and ActiveRecord, but weren’t given much slide space. I learned quickly that this would be an introductory presentation on Castle. I ended up with over fifty slides…

The Presentation
I had anticipated a small crowd. Before Code Camp, typical attendance for the FW User Group was around fifteen-twenty. Plus, this was a cold December night. I thought the number would be more like ten… But Microsoft was kind enough to offer thirty-five VS 2008 copies to attendees via a random drawing (I won one, btw). Mark, who co-runs the group had informed me the day before I spoke that registration was around sixty (seventy-plus the day of the speech). This high registration number had be a little distracted…

I’m used to speaking in front of people. I’m an adjunct at Fairfield University. I teach programming to nearly thirty college students every Wednesday night. I’ve also led several brown bag lunches at work. I even used to work as an MCT. But Code Camp showed me that it’s different speaking to one’s peers. The teacher-student relationship doesn’t necessarily apply. Attendees want to know how to apply this technology to their problems. My students are learning how to solve problems with technology.

Because of the attendance, the event wasn’t held in a classroom as it usually is. I was on a podium, in a dark auditorium with a spotlight. I didn’t much care for the detachment from the audience. It’s hard to engage a shadow. I suppose this setting is something with which I should become familiar should I hope ever to speak in a large conference setting. Having a conversation with (as opposed to lecturing to) a nearly faceless audience is part of what makes a good speaker good.

I spent a great deal of time trying to research answers to questions I was anticipating. I learned a great deal more about ActiveRecord and NHibernate in the process. I don’t recall any questions that were newly learned. The questions I did receive were typically about how to do something the Castle way (i.e. pagination in view components). I feel I answered questions effectively and without too much hesitation, which was a good feeling.

In Conclusion…
Overall I was happy with my presentation. Admittedly, I had more fun at Code Camp. This feeling is about the setting. It’s easier to be near the audience. Though I am pleased to have made it through my slides. The audience seemed a bit fatigued. The VS 2008 give away pushed my start and end time out and people started to leave as it got late. I wasn’t insulted, this happens at all meetings…

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to speak at a Code Camp sponsored by the Fairfield / Westchester .NET User Group. Preparing and delivering a presentation for your peers is a lot of work. For this, my first post, I’ll discuss this experience.

Picking a Topic
The first and most obvious step is to pick a topic. My co-worker Mark co-chaired the event. He mentioned a need for topics in the Web 2.0 track, so I volunteered to present Web 2.0 with ASP.NET.

Rather than the obligatory ASP.NET AJAX talk this topic usually brings, I decided to go with alternate approaches to Web 2.0 using ASP.NET. With technologies like Castle and jQuery and topics like tagging and mapping to cover, I had no shortage of material.

Preparing the Slides
I decided to use Google Docs to create the presentation. I figured it was an appropriate choice given my topic. Google’s presentation software is very well done, though I’m certainly not ready to abandon Impress.

I kept the slides short and succinct. The presentation was only an hour long and I didn’t want to be reading code off of slides. Instead, I planned to rely on my supporting examples (see below).

Preparing the Examples
I decided that my own Web 2.0 experience was too disconnected. I’d used some of the tools (Castle, jQuery) in very non-Web 2.0 ways. I’d been to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference and seen some good talks on some interesting topics (location with Mapstraction was one). But I had never put myself through the pain of building a Web 2.0 site from scratch. So I decided to challenge myself…

In the three weeks following my topic submission and acceptance, I decided to use the technologies and techniques I planned to present together in a single site. I dusted off a couple of ideas I had floating around and decided that Jeopardy Story would be the most feasible. A few late nights (don’t run batch files that delete files that haven’t been committed at 2 AM), lots of Google power development and some help from friends (content not code) got me to a pretty reasonable beta in time for my presentation.

The Presentation
I was the last presenter of the day. Some of the nearly 80 attendees had left by late afternoon. The room in which my presentation was held was off the beaten path and I feared I’d be speaking to an empty room. That wasn’t the case. I had a pretty good crowd (20-30).

Having spent so much time preparing Jeopardy Story I realized I never really practiced the talk. Sure I’d gone over bits here and there, but I never really put it all together. Had I done so, I think I would have had more content on the slides. It’s not easy to keep to a tight schedule when you’re showing code that covers so many topics.

I think Jeopardy Story was a nice visual to show how I applied the technologies in my talk. But I think something is lost in not working through some samples from scratch. Showing how I used jQuery to create an auto-complete textbox doesn’t have the same take-home value as writing the code from scratch (it’s wicked easy by the way).

The Overall Experience
Presenting at Code Camp was totally worth the effort and time. I had some rough spots and I learned a lot about the process of preparing to speak. Preparing the site was fun and it forced me to do something I’d been talking about doing for two years. But I’m not likely to tie a major web site building effort to a presentation again.

It’s always challenging to find the balance between text-heavy slides and slides that don’t help the cadence of a presentation. Even the more experienced speakers had problems with time. I’ll have to start recording myself as I practice…

Afterwards, I had some attendees approach me to provide some positive feedback on the talk and express interest in the topic. While I’m sure I didn’t impress everyone, it seems I did some.

Would I do it again?
Actually, I did just last week. I’ll write about that later…