I just got back from presenting "An Introduction to Express" for VBUG London, and it was awesome. Well mostly, but the non-awesome stuff was my fault.
The venue was Microsoft's office in Soho and it was truly cool, almost a micro-TechEd like environment. We had a nice big group of people show up, including a bunch of non-VBUG members which is cool, and Microsoft provided great facilities. The conference room had row upon row of chairs, a massive screen and speaker system - in fact I have got to admit that this was the very best usergroup venue I have ever spoken at.
I had done the presentation before at Horsham VBUG and learned some lessons there after I literally ran out of time while presenting. So this time I had tweaked the slides and both sessions came in right on the money time wise. I love it when that happens. The glitch though was my over eagerness to try out a new feature of Powerpoint that I'd not seen before.
Powerpoint has a presenter mode. If you have two screens attached (the built in one on a notebook and a projector for example) just go to the Slide Show menu, click on Set up and you can turn on presenter mode and choose the monitor to show slides on. In my case this meant the slides jumped up on the massive screen behind me while my monitor showed me the current slide, future slides and my notes. What a great feature huh? Well, no. I totally forgot that in a tech-demo heavy presentation I need to stick the software I'm demoing on the screen that the user's can see. With it up there, I can't see it. A true Homer moment. Doh.
So, for the first session I made a bunch of screwups and felt pretty uncomfortable as I tried to demo VB Express features with my neck doing the Exorcist spin round thing. Not cool.
The second session though I went back to one screen mirrored up to the big display and it went great. A fantastic hands on demo of Visual Web Developer that went on for about 30 minutes and had the perfect reaction from some of the attendees (Oooo, wow, gosh, ahhhh), and ended up with lots of great questions and even a few tips for me about the software's features from one particular attendee who had used VS2005 ASP.NET 2.0 quite a lot. All in all, a great session. I don't think I've had that much presenting for a long time.
So, big thanks to Microsoft for the venue (and the software), to the Microsoft Engineer that helped me set up and actually stayed 3 hours past hometime to make sure all was fine, to Keith Plunkett for chairing, and of course to VBUG for promoting the event and getting a good sized audience in there.
12:10:43 PM 
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