DevConnections - Day 3 - Sessions, sessions, sessions

Just a quick note as I'm trying to catch up on the blogging this week. My sessions are done as of yesterday and I'll have links to various resources as I get the blog entries done over the next few days.

I just wanted to mention that the Community Technology Preview release for Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services is out. This is the grown-up version of the Web Part templates for 2003 that would create a Hello World Web Part, but it is so much more than that. This is a 1.0 release and there are some restrictions using it (for example you have to have a zone in order to have a data view web part rather than just plopping it on a page). You can download the CTP here. There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that the tool doesn't work quite right with Beta 2 or Beta 2 TR, but at least you can check out the Visual Studio interation.

Mindsharp Guys

Thanks for the great feedback on the session here in Vegas as the comments were much appreciated and help me shape better value for you guys in the future. The only thing with the feedback is that I got some negative feedback because I didn't have slides, and the feedback was that there was nowhere to take notes. Yell at me if you want, but there are blank pages in the book for notes. I don't believe that there's much value in having slides with regurgitated content from a demo. The value in the demo is from the demo itself and generally slides that have bullet points really need a lot of context behind them for them to make sense if you look at them days or weeks later. I'm not saying slides are no good and to each his own, but I'm just finding that in past presentations I've done, the slides had little value in actually being a reference. So I'm currently slideless in my presentations and probably need to rethink this to find a good balance between no slides and slides with gobs of text on them. Anyways, the whole presentations without slides is an entire blog entry that I'll think about as I'm sure everyone has an opinion about it.

Also based on the feedback that some of you provided in my sessions I am going to be doing a series of blog entries on small bits and pieces of things that I would go over in the session. For example there may be a small thing that I demo'd for 10 minutes but it's worth a full blog entry that would go through it in-depth. This makes sense to me as you have to cram so much into an hour presentation, but a blog entry should provide a lot more value as a follow-up. So watch for these SharePoint 2007 entries in coming weeks.

BTW, if you're in Vegas you just have to drop by the Bellagio and see the fountain show. It runs fairly frequently and is set to music (different music each time it seems) and really impressive. Check it out but here's a pic of it from last night:

P1010060

Todays Gambling Debt: -$200. Bad luck at the machines.

2 Comments

  • Finding a balance might be a good idea but I'm with you. If the slides don't add anything, why waste disk space and paper? Besides, you just know that when you add them, you'll get feedback saying you use too many.

    I dunno, maybe people like to have something to prove they went to the presentation.

    Anyway, the event sounds fun. Keep up the updates.

  • Bil,

    I felt you gave a pretty good talk on events. I personally like code demos rather than slides so I will say stick to your style.

    By the way, you were gonna post the code for event recievers some where... Can you let me know if you have already done so?

    anabhra.soni@rotary.org

    thanks,
    anabhra

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