Presentation at Seattle .NET Developers VB User Group

On Monday night I was the guest speaker at the Seattle .NET Developers VB User Group meeting. This is a group run by Robert Green of the VB team and meets monthly on the Microsoft campus. Robert had asked me to come and speak next time I was in town - so there I was !

My talk was on ADO.NET, along the lines of "something old, something new".  The first part was discussions and demos of some more advanced "real-world" techniques with ADO.NET 1.1.  Over the past few years I have developed a large set of such techniques and have given many different conference presentations where I choose 3-4 of these techniques to present and demo. These talks have always been well-received, since they are very pragmatic and I spend more time in demos than on Powerpoint slides.

The second part of my presentation was on ADO.NET 2.0.  Although I have spoken about this in the past, this was the first time I really developed and showed a set of demos to show off some of the improvements and new programming techniques. This was challenging and fun - especially when the day before the presentation my VPC got trashed and I had to reinstall Whidbey and Yukon (alot more challenging, alot less fun).

The meeting/presentation was a great success.  I spoke for 2 hours, all of my demos worked, and I got good feedback and questions.  OK, Bill Vaughn tried to hassle me a bit (as he has done before) - but I expected that :-)   It was also nice to see some of the VB PMs in the audience.