DevTeach: Entertaining Presenters

While taking in the technical content here at DevTeach Vancouver, I've been watching out for speakers who are knowledgeable and highly entertaining at the same time. When you're sitting in an airless hotel meeting room, the presenters who can keep you truly engaged for 45-55 minutes are the ones you want to see again and recommend to others.

Top marks of the day (in the sessions I attended) go to Richard Campbell and Kent Alstad who were excellent even in the deadly last-session-of-the-day slot. Don't miss hearing Richard  speak. He keeps things hopping with his high energy, big voice, dramatic gestures, and funny interjections ("Consultant... that's what you get when merging 'con game' and 'insult'"). Kent plays off Richard very well with great timing, talking about his job "Killing Web Servers for Fun and Profit." (The talk was on "The Scaling Habits of ASP.NET Applications".)

Another speaker you should catch whenever you can is Microsoft's John Bristowe who moves things along at a real clip. I attended two of his well-prepared sessions today. John's another guy with a booming voice and an infectious enthusiasm for whatever he's talking about. John's not afraid to poke fun at his employer's products, describing Notepad as "a presentation tool we ship with Windows". When Visual Studio 2008 was slow loading during his demo, John described it as a Windows Vista "Process Wait" feature. John's joke of the day for conference speakers is that if you want to "guarantee high evaluations for your presentation", wow the audience by pressing the Ctrl key in VS2008 while the IntelliSense drop-down list is showing. (IntelliSense becomes transparent.)

Sure it's a technical conference but that doesn't mean it can't be entertaining.