Need to speak into the mike more clearly, but still 5000 was a nice little reward for a couple of days effort.

And that’s the last time I ever demo a web application – I’m sticking to proper code from now on.

Regarding my session being called ‘Cruise Control .Net’ – unfortunately the abstract was not included on the printed agenda. In my defence this is it:

“Continuous Integration one of the easiest wins that most .Net teams have yet to implement. Automated builds are common in Java teams and we need to catch up! Paul will demonstrate how easy it is to install and configure Cruise Control for C# or VB.Net projects. Additionally this session covers the basics of MSBuild, NAnt, NUnit, NCover and FxCop.”

Glad to hear the session was useful anyway.

I’m afraid I just don’t see what any of this has to do with a “business” application (and the whole sales pitch for the talk ha been that this time we were going to get into the real world of writing business apps with WPF). Of course this may have happened in Part 2 of the talk but after an hour that really seemed to show the opposite I wasn’t inclined to give up another hour to find out. I felt way too much time was spent on the sort of frippery that was used a lot in the early introductory sessions on WPF that people were giving a couple of years ago. Such demo’s smack to me of the old ‘marquee’ or ‘blink’ tags that that surfaced in the early days of HTML – just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it SHOULD be done. Does anybody really think these gimmicks, which certainly show how WPF is different from WinForms, are actually things you’d want to use in any kind of application?

I’d agree it was probably a good “introduction to WPF” hour if you knew nothing about WPF, but that wasn’t what it was advertised to be.

There were the odd one or two technical problems in sessions I attended, James especially had problems in his Facebook demo – Paul also had hiccups too, but generally my experience was better than some previous days.

I think more often than not your DDD experience can be pretty variable if you happen to get some poor sessions. As to Guy – don’t think I’ve been to a bad presentation of his – both good presentations and technically strong too.

The “Astoria” talk was the highlight for me (Guy is always good value) and the grok talks were entertaining, and I thought only the “Arabian Nights” talk was a bit thin, albeit some nice variety in the midst of the other technical stuff (I’m probably biased having done two and a half years in Saudi and another two in Kuwait) and there were a couple of bullet points on there that really would have offended the natives if the presentation had been given in Dubai.

All-in-all a good day, but I felt too many of the talks were like the “bad old days of MSDN” (thought the “Silverlight” was a classic example – if I want to see someone cut and pasting a lot of code I can download it from codeplex) – demo’s that weren’t well prepared, with oft-times questions being asked that the speakers (I felt) ought to have known the answers to having to be answered with an “I don’t know. Email me and I’ll try and find out for you”.

I honestly felt that the knowledge level of speakers at DDD and DDD2 were generally higher (almost at the “rock star” level) with much more emphasis on “real world” experience than those I attended today. Basic “canned” demo’s showing the strengths in a rather glossy, rather simplistic “marketing” light were too much in evidence and it was embarrassing how many times different presenters having made a mistake in even their basic demo’s couldn’t see what the mistakes they’d made were or uttered gems such as “I don’t remember what class I put the code we need in and can’t find it. Never mind”.

I couldn’t help but come away thinking that maybe some of the speakers have become a bit complacent about the success of DDD and the need to fully prep and really know the subject they’re going to present on, rather than working through the basics that anybody with a few hours to spare could probably put together themselves. Too harsh? I don’t think so. Add in some basic lack of speaker skills (tips: repeat questions that most of the audience can’t hear; don’t insult those asking questions even if you think they deserve it unless it’s to make a joke or you know the person and are ripping them; realise that just throwing great wads of code without any explanation on an overhead doesn’t mean anything to anyone; realise that when the demo you’re giving doesn’t match in any way what you’ve said should happen you shouldn’t ignore the evidence on the screen in front of you and everyone else and ignore it hoping nobody says anything; if you’re trying to squeeze a 4 hour presentation into 2 hours – which is a bit of a luxury to start with – don’t waffle away the first 15 minutes – time is money and crack on with it!)

Personally I’d like to see Guy giving all new speakers (and some old ones) a “how to give a presentation” course as he was light years ahead of most of the people I saw today.