Last week I was a few days in Redmond for a couple of reasons. With only three more weeks to go until Tech*Ed 2007 starts in Orlando, preparations for this conference were an important reason to fly up to Redmond. On Thursday I rehearsed my Windows Mobile performance talk, which is centered on the diagnostic tools that ship with Visual Studio 2005 and the new tools that will ship with Visual Studio Orcas to help you create better performing managed applications. Of course I will not only talk about the tools, but I will also talk about quite a few best practices that you can use right away when you want to get the best performance out of your managed device application. Back to Thursday then. This was not just a rehearsal my Tech*Ed talk, but a full dress rehearsal, meaning delivering the entire talk, including jokes and running all demos for a real audience of three people and an imaginary audience of hopefully 200+ people. The latter being the number of attendees that hopefully show up for my MBL406 talk on Thursday June 7th in Orlando. During the Redmond rehearsal the presentation went pretty well. However, only 2 out of 5 demos were working properly, 1 of them around Visual Studio Orcas was not working at all. So there is definitely a lot of work to do to get all those demos working perfectly in the upcoming three weeks. Besides not working demos I only have one little problem to solve. Similar to MEDC, presentations for Tech*Ed are 75 minutes long. An ideal presentation lasts for 60 minutes with 15 minutes reserved for questions and answers. It is almost funny that a performance talk like the one I will give in Orlando ran over dramatically during rehearsals. Instead of 75 minutes we are currently at around 90 minutes with almost nothing that can be dropped from the presentation. Right now this feels like a bad performing performance talk. I guess I need to use some of my own performance best practices to get this talk performing better. Hopefully those best practices really work. If you want to find out if they work I can only advice you to come to Tech*Ed in Orlando, three weeks or T-23 days from now and make sure to drop in at the MBL406 session on Thursday. Even if we can shorten the talk a little bit, don’t count on those luxurious 15 minutes at the end of the session to ask questions. I guess we will have to run a Q &A session outside the presentation room. Ah well, I am sure there will be plenty of coffee, sodas and snacks around so it should be fun.
Maarten Struys |
