How Not to Make a Conference Presentation
Currently at
VSLive Orlando, where I did a workshop on Windows Workflow Foundation with Robert Green on Monday, and then three other sessions:
What's New in Visual Studio 2008 for ASP.NET Developers
Investigating LINQ to XML
Build a WPF Application in an Hour
If you're interested, you can view slides and download demos for those talks
here.
In preparation for these talks, I entered the schedule for the conference, as it was at the time we first discussed it, many months ago, into Outlook. I had carefully scheduled each session, taking care of time zone differences, into the calendar. What I neglected to do was check the current schedule before heading down to my first session this morning. Yikes. I arrived at 9:44 for the session, thinking I had 30 minutes to hang out, when I noticed that the signage indicated that the session started at 9:45. And the room was completely full of folks eagerly awaiting wisdom on new features in Visual Studio 2008 for ASP.NET developers!
To add to the misery, I was toting a MacBook Pro for the presentation, and had just shut down the Vista VPC I was planning on using for the presentation. Oh, wait. I had also left the stupid VGA dongle in my hotel room. We frantically boot up the VPC, run around looking for an extra dongle (of which the show's speaker manager, the amazing Toby Malina, had an extra), and run sweating and out of breath up on the stage to give the session, which consisted of a demo with about a zillion steps.
Amazingly, once we finally got the video working, the session went fine. The audience was quite patient, and most waited out the five minutes of flailing onstage. Thanks to all who stuck with it!
In any case: the moral learned is to CHECK THE SCHEDULE at the conference. Very simple. D'oh.