On Wednesday, I gave my first
talk as a Microsoft employee. I was told that the talk was for a bunch of UK
folks that needed to be put on the .NET path and could I do 90 minutes on intro
to WinForms in a conference room on campus? I can do intro to WinForms material
for hours without preparation, so I didn’t do any. Instead, I showed up with my
laptop and plugged it into the overhead, where I then spent 10 minutes wrestling
to get it out of suspend mode (the world needs faster hard drives!).
While
my HD woke up (apparently jet-lagged from the trip between building 5 and
building 43), I started warming up the crowd with questions “How many of you are
C++ programmers? How many VB programmers?” The room was split pretty evenly
between C++ and VB, taking half of my jokes away (I’m happy to make fun of
either C++ or VB programmers equally, but it’s less fun when only half the room
laughs). Plus, these guys were *way* jet lagged, so getting them to even keep
their eyes open in the afternoon after they’d arrived was a challenge, let alone
getting them to laugh or even engage.
And then, because my HD was still
shaking off the dust, I asked “Did you hear anything good today?” Predictable,
they said that they’d like the story of web services (Don had been there earlier
in the morning) and that caused me to launch into my rendition of
how WinForms + Web Services provided a wonderful way to keep all of the UI logic
on a single machine, as opposed to web applications, where the UI is split
between the client and the server. They weren’t biting.
Plus, after diving
into some WinForms intro material and having it fall flat (anchoring and docking
normally wows ’em), I did a bit of deeper digging into my audience. It turns out
that most of them were old hands at WinForms, throwing my planned material right
out the window. Luckily, I did find a topic that they’re weren’t familiar with:
href-exes. So, I did
my normal href-exe shtick for about 60 minutes, getting them to wake up, ask
questions and even laugh a bit at my witty repartee.
Thinking I was in the
clear, I opened the floor for questions. Of course, the first question they
asked was the same question I’d have asked if I were in their shoes (as I so
often was until about a month ago), “What’s new in
WinForms 2.0?” And that’s where things got shaky again. I had some ideas of
where WinForms 2.0 was going in the next release of .NET, but nothing concrete
(I’ve been buried in Longhorn and a whole new culture too deep to dig into
WinForms futures yet). Plus, even the things that I did know, I had no idea what
I could say. Where these guys under NDA? What could I say to them if they were?
What can I say to them if they’re not? Even if I’m not supposed to say anything,
I want them to like me (every speaker’s guiding principle) and I wanted to say
something besides “I know, but I’m not going to tell you. <bpffffft>!”
So,
I stammered out what I knew to be some WinForms desires without making any
promises on their behalf and hoping no one would ever know (except my closest
friends reading this spout entry : ). It wasn’t a happy experience. I should
have talked with the WinForms guys before my talk so I knew what I could say
about the future. Rookie mistake #1.
Rookie mistake #2: In an effort to
stay open to these guys, I wrote my alias on the flipchart and then, while I
filled in the domain, kept answering questions. When I looked back at the
flipchart, I discovered that I’d written “csells@sellsbrothers.com”. Doh! Since
it was a flipchart and not a whiteboard, I couldn’t even erase it. <sigh>
All in all, I think I got them jazzed about href-exes, but it was definitely not
my finest talk. Luckily, it was internal and to a small group; I would have been
mortified to have given that performance at a larger venue. Plus, making fun of
VB programmers isn’t fun anymore. I mean, they’re customers, too. Looks like I’m
going to need some new material…
