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It's amazing what you learn....
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...by preparing a presentation on a topic. This has been a ton of fun. I think I should start preparing PowerPoint presentations on a variety of topics that I want to improve my skills with. It's been said many times that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
-Eric.
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Presenting on Longhorn/XAML tomorrow night......
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Tomorrow night I'm presenting to my own User Group. In our group's near one and a half years of existence, this will be a first for me. I'm no stranger to being in front of crowds, though. I've always been somewhat of a ham growing up. I enjoy being in front of the camera as much as being behind the camera. I was the music geek in High School who played Sax as well as Sang in Varsity Chorus. I did the extra curricular Jazz Band as well as traveling “vaudeville” style singing troupe (We were called ‘The Pioneer Express” - Top Hat and Cane required).
Through my IT career, I've made plenty of presentations to clients as well as potential clients. I've been an adjunct instructor and taught a 10 week course, as well as made presentations on “Intro to Java Programming” at conferences (in my previous life). Heck, I even proposed to my wife while on center stage under a spotlight in front of a crowd of about 1500. She was only slightly embarrassed, but will have that memory for a lifetime.
The main reason I'm doing this is plainly because I was unable to locate another speaker. I wanted to secure someone at least one month ahead of time. The two possible speakers I had been working on fell through at the last moment before our last meeting. So I decided that this would be the easiest solution. I find that it's actually less stressful to create a presentation and deliver it than to go through the headache of trying to secure a speaker on very short notice.
In the session I've put together, we'll touch on the 4 pillars of Longhorn: The Fundamentals, Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS. We'll touch very lightly on the Fundamentals and Indigo, just giving an explanation of what they are and the role they play. Then we'll look at WinFS and how it will allow programmers to do some cool stuff with storage. And finally, the bulk of the presentation will focus around Avalon. We'll talk about the Application and the NavigationApplication classes before we put on our wet suit and dive into XAML.
I hope that everyone who shows up will have a good time and enjoy the presentation. So far, I have always received very positive feedback in regards to our group and the way things operate. There was only one instance were someone felt compelled to post any comments that were negative. I'm all for constructive criticism, but these comments were more personal and less constructive, so I removed them from my blog and the discussion forum on our group web site. I take negative personal comments with a grain of salt, and just move on. Kevin on the other hand, took offense to the comments and decided to post his own remarks. As for me, I'll just keep on rollin and spreading the news about .NET technologies.
-Eric.
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OK. I'll start posting again now....
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I had to take short break from posting to my blog. I enjoy sharing the video clips with everyone. I have more material to share, so keep checking back to see what's new. Each of the video blog posts I have made took about an hour each to work on. That does not include encoding time. That includes editing, uploading, and blogging the video. There are only so many hours in a day, so the ol' blog is on the short list when something must go in order to create more available time for 'real' projects.
The videos will be back. Someone out there has been watching these things. The video blog post with Rocky Lhotka alone has received over 1400 “Web Views”. That is encouragement enough to keep it up.
-Eric.