I was asked a few months ago to give a presentation at my companies once a month GeekSpeak this January. I was to give a presentation on the new features available to ASP.Net 2.0. Considering there are so many new features, and many of the new features were provided to limit the amount of code required I decided to give a presentation on the code-less functionality of the new features for ASP.Net 2.0. The hope was that by showing how the controls could be simply be dropped onto a form, configurations set through the GUI, and then deployed without many hassles it would show off the neat new abilities provided by ASP.Net 2.0. At least that was my thought anyway.
Well, I got out of my client site about 4pm after working a solid nine without lunch, and started booking it downtown. The client is a little more than an hour away from the downtown office in case you were wondering. I get to the office about 4:40 (may have sped a little), went up to the bullpen (u-shaped cubicle isle way where developers work) to chat with a few associates I hadn’t seen in a while, and started into the presentation room at 5pm. Things were good, everyone had a beer from the company fridge, I was getting setup, and the night before I fixed the lack of SQL Express on the laptop that prevented me from including local databases into the APP_DATA folder. After getting setup I tried to use the projector to display my main display, and that’s when the problems started. First the monitor appeared on the projector (as a second monitor when marked as attached), and regardless of what I nor anyone else tried the projector would not display my main display. Thank you Dell Latitude D610 and your (l)atitude against working properly with external displays.
So in the end we worked out a combination where I displayed the main display on the projector via the Fn-F8 key combo, and I gave the presentation sitting sideways to everyone. It was a bit awkward as I had to violate the don’t speak to the room with your back turned policy, but I did try to focus on returning my focus. Having been up till after 1am studying for finance, troubleshooting the lack of SQL Express/installing SQL Express on the work laptop to display my examples, well it left my brain a little scattered. I gave the presentation and unfortunately deviated from the planned material I had wanted to focus on. I never do prepared speeches as I’m not likely to remember them verbatim so I like to give on the fly presentations as its pretty interesting what new topics get addressed that may otherwise have been scripted over.
In the end I started to recover the presentation about a quarter of the way into giving the talk and trying to demo the material. It went a bit smoother, not totally ripple free, but in the end we got some dialog from the room. Three of the audience members have used ASP.Net, and my luck is that our resident SharePoint expert was in the room, and wanted to contradict that a custom user control plopped into the WebPartZone on the page did not represent an actual WebPart. I’m aware of web parts, and the coding required to make them render correctly, but the way I see it is that a custom user control included into the WebPartZone with attributes set would constitute a WebPart. I’ll have to do more reading to determine who is accurate, but the point stands that it’s still a neat feature to have when developing web applications.
Anyway, the presentation went ok, not fantastic, but I suppose it went well. I’ve yet to hear any feedback (so it could have been horrible) so I’ll have to wait till I hear anything about it before I profess adequate success or major inner office fax-pas. It’s strange being able to talk in front of total strangers without unease, but giving presentations to a group of people I work with and know caught me on edge. I suppose the jitters may have won this round, but the war continues.
Business, User Groups