The Moth

I've been meaning to post something like this for a while and having just spent 8 (eight) days of training (DPE summit + TechReady 6 + Deep Dive on XYZ), I need no more incentives ;)

I am assuming that we've all been to sessions/events where the presenter switched from PowerPoint to their machine for a demo and immediately our brain goes in overdrive to take in all the colourful input and icons that have just been unleashed on it (completely ignoring the presenter's voice which just fades in the distance, of course). Or maybe that just happens to me ;-)

Well, I am no expert, but here is some advice anyway for those of you giving demos in presentations:

1. Run at 1024x768 resolution during the session/demo.

2. Run at (120) High DPI. I cannot stress this enough. If you are on Vista this requires a reboot but give it a try now and you'll never look back (all icons suddenly come alive).

3. Your Task Bar should only show applications running that are being used in the demo (and the session overall). Any unnecessary application should be closed.

4. Your Task bar should be as small as possible (i.e. only one row). Doesn't matter what size it is when you are working on your machine; taking away pixels from the audience has no excuse when there is absolutely no use for it being larger during a demo.

5. Your taskbar should be at the bottom where most people expect it to be and it should not auto-hide (very distracting).

6. You know those icons on the right of the taskbar (commonly referred to as the systray or just "tray")? If you are not using them for the demo, then kill them. Right click on each one and "Exit". If any don't offer an Exit option, open task manager and kill the offending processes. If there is an icon that cannot be closed for whatever reason and is not used in the demo, hide it (Taskbar Properties->Notification Area). This includes hiding icons such as the volume icon, network activity etc, if they are not used in the demo. For most of my demos I just have the clock (cause I like glancing at it) and the power meter (because I am paranoid that someone will pull the plug and my laptop will die ;-)) – nothing else.

7. You know all those toolbars on the task bar (e.g. Desktop, Address etc)? Get rid of them unless they are used in the demo. The special toolbar is Quick Launch: This is where you may choose to have the shortcuts to your demos (or even just a shortcut to Visual Studio). In that case make sure that all other shortcuts are out of view by resizing the quick launch bar.

8. Hide all the icons on your desktop (right click->View->Show Desktop Icons). The exception to this is when you place the shortcuts to your demos on the desktop. In that case, hide all the remainder icons by moving them into some other temporary folder (and go back to step 7 and hide your quick launch toolbar since you have just opted out of that approach).

9. Choose a standard Windows Wallpaper for your desktop background (the default if possible) – unless you are using your current one as a prop for a laugh etc. You can change it back to a picture of your kids when the session is over. Remember, this isn't about you; it is about what you are there to show.

10. Turn off your screen saver (and don't rely on battery power alone – always plug in your laptop. And change the laptop_lid_close_action to do nothing).

11. BONUS non-visual tip for demos: A side effect of steps 3 and 6 will be that your machine is slightly faster during the demo (where any kind of visible slow down is amplified by the presence of an audience). Open task manager and make your machine even more responsive by killing unnecessary processes (or even stopping services) that you are not going to use in this particular demo. But don't take it to the extreme.

Feel free to add your own tips below if you think I missed any...

Recently I wrote a 2-page article on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework v3.5 for QBS Software. You'll find the hard copy of the QBS magazine via various means if you are in the UK, and they have also kindly made it available online. Download the 1MB PDF file here.

A long time ago I created a hyperlinked list of the new assemblies in .NET Framework v3.5 and the only one that did not have a hyperlink was the WMI assembly (item 6 on the list).

So, I was very pleased that in last week's MSDN Flash we published a 500 word succinct article on that very topic. For the non-Flash subscribers, scroll down on this page to read it.

After my two week relaxing Xmas/NewYear break, the numerous January events were a bit of a "shock to the system" dominating my time. Now onto February and it is not looking any easier as you can see below.

Hope to meet you at one of these:

+ 5th, TVP, Details and registration.

+ 8-17, Seattle, Details.

+ 18th, Bristol, Details and registration (how jetlagged am I going to be for this?!).

+ 21st, Manchester, Details and registration.

+ 26th, TVP, Details and registration.

+ 27th, TVP, Members of the UK press talk to your MS contact.

Virtualization is going to be (if it isn't already) a huge topic for anyone involved in the IT industry. I know that IT Pros are very excited about Microsoft's offering with Windows Server 2008 but I wasn't sure how many developers have at least a high level appreciation of what virtualization is and how Hyper-V fits into the big picture.

To find out, I would encourage you to spend some time browsing the numerous links and content on these sites:
1. Microsoft Virtualization.
2. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
3. Also recently, Bob Muglia sent this executive email on virtualization, should you need something to forward to your manager.
4. Finally, see this dedicated blog.

If you have access to the TechEd Europe IT Forum 2007 post-conference recordings, there are 4 sessions that I recommend: MGT323, SVR307, SVR320 and SVR322. I watched those collective 300 minutes and (combined with what floated my boat from the other links above) distilled the most interesting bits into a 15'-20' section of my Windows Server 2008 developer session. It is from those 4 sessions that I stole the slides I used ;-). You can find them in this powerpoint deck (36-58 inclusive).

I attended Tech Ready 3 in July 2006, but I missed the two in-between so I will be going back to Seattle for TechReady 6 (the internal week-long Microsoft conference) in 2-3 weeks.

This time I will also be presenting a session at TR6 so, if for whatever reason you get bored of listening to the product teams, come to my session (DEV353) for some field-to-field demos :-)

I am also looking forward to meeting with people I know electronically but not in-person yet, and to catching up with older acquaintances. If that sounds like you and you are free between Friday 8 and Saturday 16 February please ping me!

Why is it that 50% of the people watch the screencasts and are asking for more and the other half don't (see links from Q8 and the comments)? In my view, everybody should watch screencasts (to be clear, I mean as a complementary activity to reading articles). If you haven't ever watched one, there are some links here (plus check out the UK MSDN page).

"What is so great about screencasts anyway?"
Many things:
a) Following a document step-by-step to achieve a goal is fine, but what about when you don't have the right stuff installed? It is many times that I have received emails from people saying words to the effect: "Having watched your video I am now downloading XYZ to give it a try!". Those people would not have gotten the same enthusiastic experience from reading a document. E.g. when Vista wasn't so widely available, this Sidebar Gadgets video could not have had the same effect in written form.

b) Even if you have the right stuff installed, what is it that would motivate you to invest time in following some steps to achieve a goal, i.e. how do you know it is going to be worth it? Instead you watch a short video and it is easy to decide if you want to go ahead and explore this technology further or not, e.g. how many desktop developers own a Windows Mobile phone and are aware of the dedicated managed API (not talking about the Compact Framework here)?

c) Let's face it, a picture is worth 1000 words which makes a video worth numberOfFrames*1000 words. I explained the LINQ-to-objects relationship with the language features on this blog and received good feedback. I described it in a video and I received outstanding feedback. How would you capture the effect of my LINQ video in written form?

d) It is not just about the topic being demonstrated, there are side learnings. Whenever I watch someone else do a screencast I pick up productivity/usability tips (e.g. some new ones in VS2008) about the way the presenter uses the tools or talks about certain concepts that is different to my mileage. You just don't get that in a written piece of text. Screencasts bring a demo at your desk, which usually you pay money for to see at a conference!

e) I was going to add a few more reasons here but they are weaker and I don't want to dilute the main points above. Feel free to add your own reasons why you like or hate screencasts in the comments below.

THE REAL PROBLEM
Now, let me tell you why I find videos sometimes lacking: Non-scanability. In the age of information overload, I usually scan pieces of text for the interesting points and probably abandon 80% of the web pages that I randomly visit within seconds. You cannot do that with videos today – once you've started watching it is hard to scan through without missing huge chunks of content. This is the reason that I seldom even attempt to watch videos over 30' unless I know for sure that I am interested in the topic in a big way! Table of contents with timings help slightly but everything I have seen that tried to address the problem is inadequate. My attempt to make it less painful is to keep screencasts at 15' long because then you are investing a reasonable amount of time and you can probably tell if it is worth to continue to watch after 3'. To that extent, I try to have a quick intro telling you what's coming. I also offer the additional download option which means that clicking forward/backwards to scan will be very fast as opposed to the streaming media (craze that is taking over the world) that largely relies on sequential viewing...

The larger question of how do we make long videos scanable remains. I think there is an opportunity here for some clever software: I point this piece of software to a wmv file and it instantly produces a complete transcript from the audio and it highlights every word as the video continues to play. No matter what word I click on in the transcript, the video follows suit by synchronising itself. Now I can watch and listen to the video and concurrently quickly scan for words/phrases of interest so that I can jump directly to that piece with a single click. Anyone building such software or does it even exist already? I can be a beta tester ;-)

On 3 recent events I spent 20' talking about the new native threading APIs in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Here are resources as promised.

1. Thread Pool – re-architected native ThreadPool that amongst other things allows multiple pools per process.

2. One-Time Initialization – think singletons for the native world with an interesting option of asynchronous initialization.

3. Slim Reader/Writer Lock (SRW) – finally a reader writer lock out of the box for native devs.

4. Condition Variables – addresses scenarios such as the classic producer/consumer pattern in a more efficient way than previous techniques.

5. Thread Ordering Service (TOS) – an interesting service that I cannot find a compelling use case for. If you've got one, let me know!

6. Wait Chain Traversal (WCT) – aids in programmatically debugging deadlocks and hangs.

The links above point to the MSDN documentation where you can click further to read the API descriptions and click further to see code examples. In addition, the MSDN Magazine has 3 articles that describe all of the above (except for the TOS):
- June 2007 – Describes Condition vars, SRW, and One-Time Init. Don't let the title fool you, these are even more applicable with the release of Windows Server 2008.
- July 2007 – Describes usage of the WCT from unsafe C# code to create a utility.
- October 2007 – Describes the New Thread Pool APIs.

Lastly, I have created some slides for the above. Nothing fancy, just very boring bullets with lots of text and API signatures with nothing additional than what you can find in the links above. Their only use is if you need to talk about this topic and cannot be bothered to create your own from scratch, you can use mine as a starting point. See slides 8-22 inclusive in this deck.

Little over a month ago I posted: How To Start a User Group. In addition to the list I linked to there, Dave posted his own thoughts and also Chris followed with his tips and tricks. Both are definitely worth a read. Any additional thoughts welcome (it is getting much tougher to complement those 3 though!).

In a somewhat related story, Nick complains how it is unacceptable for speakers to cancel presentations at user groups, especially at the last minute. I agree, unless there is a health issue, it is very uncool. Touch wood, I've never ever had to do that.

In other news, if you are in the UK, we now list all User Group events on the same MSDN page where we list Microsoft events – James explains how.

As always, if you want to start a user group in the UK let me know. Especially if it is one down here in Brighton & Hove where I live ;-)

I recently received (as a gift) the "Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2007 Step-by-step". I was scanning thought it to see if I am missing any tricks and came across page 232 where it advises on how to use Presenter view when using two monitors. That reminded me of how I had evaluated and discarded this feature before the 2007 version so, after looking at it again, my reasons still holds true:

3. Presentation View does not show animations. So when I go to a slide that has animations, on my screen I will see the entire slide while the audience is seeing a different one.
- I don't like looking back on the large screen because I find it distracting.
- I like to see on my screen what my audience is seeing.
- Clicking (on my clicker/mouse/keyboard) in order for the animation to appear on the large screen while nothing happens on my screen makes me uncomfortable.

2. Presentation view is useful for slide notes, but I'd rather not read anything while the audience is expecting me to be speaking instead.

1. It encourages the presenter to be in front of the laptop screen for the duration of the presentation, which whilst the only option in some venues, is not my preferred place to be.

There you have it, instead of telling you what features I do use in powerpoint, I am sharing the one that I don't... oh well, maybe you have some powerpoint tips to share?