Rob Hope

So I think the CodeCamp presentations went well. I had my Reflection one on Saturday, which went good, but it ran a little bit short because I was nervous and talked too fast. I also decided at the end of that the reason why it felt awkward to me was that it was constructed more like a sales pitch for my way of doing things rather than a demonstration of the technology. I’ve decided I’m going to rip it up and redo it at some point. Certainly at the end of the presentation my argument that being able to leverage Reflection made things easier didn’t feel right. I think the presentation can be improved dramatically.

On the flip side, I felt that the MSMQ presentation on Sunday went a lot better. The demo was much more straightforward, I finished the presentation essentially on time, and had 3 or 4 people stay after to ask me questions…and I got some applause too. I think the primary difference again was structure.

Overall I got great positive feedback on my first speaking engagements.

I also gave Peter Kellner a hand with an issue he was having with a Server Control of his. Peter organized Code Camp and did an outstanding job. I was surprised when he asked me for my opinion (maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I’m generally a humble guy…until you get to know me anyway), but I think I gave him a couple of good options for his problem. That’s all I can really say because it was something he was doing that’s proprietary, but it felt good to have someone think my opinion mattered!

I spent some time talking to Nima Dilmaghani, my Developer Envangelist, about what I need to do to become a Microsoft MVP. He said that I need to blog more, which I’ve been trying to do, so I am going to start putting up short versions of my presentations as I prepare them. I also volunteered to go present at the Santa Barbara .NET User Group if they need presenters, and I am considering volunteering for others as well. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ll have some entries up here shortly about the sessions I saw at CodeCamp, with versions of my presentations to follow.

Talk to you soon,

Rob

Hi all,

I’ve signed up to do a second session at the Silicon Valley Code Camp October 7th and 8th. In addition to my talk on Reflection, I’ll also be giving a talk on Microsoft Message Queueing and how it can be used to offload work on your application and do that work asynchronously. It’s a lot of work getting these talks together but I’m hoping this turns out to be fun!

Here’s a link to my sessions:
http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?id=c97ff760-0c11-48eb-bd41-493aab31f233

Talk to you later!

Rob