Earlier this week I had the pleasure of doing a talk for the Belgian .NET user group.  During this talk I ran in to all kinds of problems. I’ve done presentations where I was royally underprepared and to avoid that this time I actually started prepping for this talk on time. I was done on time, was prepared had 5 backups of my presentation and samples. What did I learn from this, if you’re prepared other things will go wrong.
I’ll share the story of stuff that can go wrong.

Before starting the rant I have some links to share.

• Slides
• IronRubyMvc sample – live demo – source
• Silverlight sample – live demo – source
• IronRubyMVC specs – source
• Sinatra – source
• Metaprogramming – source 

I have a device that I call internet on a stick, which is a vodafone usb 3G modem that I plug in to my system and it gets me on the internet (mistake 1). Since I assumed that that thing would continue to work I made most of my demos internet enabled (mistake 2). For example I have a demo where I go download pics from flickr and then show them with some animations with silverlight.
Before my presentation I changed the fonts, opened all the files I was going to talk about ran all the demos again to make sure they would work and everything went fine.
I unplug the USB device and go into the room to hook up the projector etc. The presentation starts and for the first hour everything went really well (from my perspective at least don’t know about the people attending).
We have a break and I plug the USB device in, at this point the vodafone program hangs (first time ever I swear). What’s more I can’t make it go away at all so I reboot my pc (this is still during the break).

Now I’m getting a little desperate because it still doesn’t work. With rebooting I also lost all my carefully opened files earlier (I’m showing code in about 3 different environments and 2 different OS’es).
So during the presentation I apologise and try to reboot once more while taking questions from the audience and hoping somebody will try to start a discussion with me. After rebooting I got a message saying my date was set to 2001 which I thought was peculiar but clicked it away.  I boot vmware fusion with windows 7 (this took fairly  long and is a little bit funky as the screen resolution changes a lot during this process).
Ok so far so good, by now I’ve already skipped the silverlight demo promising that it will be available as a download on my blog and will be moving on to the ironrubymvc sample. To prove I do actually use visual studio at times I wanted to open my demo project in visual studio. I open visual studio only for it to tell me that my trial has expired and I can either upgrade or close the application. Oooooookay this is completely weird because i get my software through my msdn subscription and I had been using it earlier that day.

Moral of the story: Either go vastly underprepared and wing it. Or don’t rely on the internet and always take at least 2 laptops that have identical configurations but I’m pretty sure those would or explode in my face or something will fall from the ceiling, building collapses or other mishaps.

Instead of having one demo go bad on me now I’m probably facing a reinstall of my mac because it lost a bunch of settings, for which I’m holding the vodafone responsible. At this moment I’m fairly certain that I should go less prepared and just wing it just out of fear for bigger disasters, people may die.

2 weeks ago I had the chance to [talk to the Italian Alt.NET community about IronRuby](http://flanders.co.nz/2009/01/25/participating-in-the-italian-altnet-user-group/). I’m pretty excited about the Ruby language and I try to convey that enthusiasm onto my victims. From the talks I had afterwards it looks like I was able to infect at least one or two enough to make them go home and download IronRuby to have a play. It is the very first time that I get to see one of my presentations myself because this one got taped and put online.

If there is one thing that watching this video has taught me then it will probably be that I need more practice and to prepare a lot better. Since I’m a kid I have the habit of walking into things hugely underprepared. I take the big bullet points of what I’m supposed to say and make a story around it when I start talking. It was my belief that those things feel more natural. After having watched this presentation I may have to come back on my point of view and probably prepare better. I don’t believe that learning everything you’re going to say by heart is a good solution either because if you then forget one thing you’re completely lost in your storyline and you may freeze.

I guess it would probably be a good idea for me to get a video camera and tape a few practice runs of presentations so that I can improve and look way more professional next time I get on a stage. That being said I really enjoy doing those things. The good thing about doing those sessions is that I get to talk to many interesting people about subjects close and dear to me.

Anyway you’re probably not waiting for me to completely dissect my performance so instead I’ll leave you with the [link to the video](http://vimeo.com/3059773)

I just finished my talk at the Italian [Alt.NET conference](http://ugialt.net).
There were the following topics of discussion:

• Domain Driven Design
• User stories & planning game
• Advanced Unit Testing in the real world
• Acceptance testing (Fitness)

And of course my topic was [IronRuby](http://ironruby.net)

Because of the level of my italian or better yet the lack thereof I couldn’t participate in many of the discussions. IMHO that was a pitty because I actually do like having discussions about programming and designing applications.

My talk went alright judging by the reactions of the people that listened to my talk. [Simone](http://codeclimber.net.nz) filmed the whole day and told me he would put up the videos on vimeo for all to see.
What I thought was particularly good for IronRuby is that there definitely interest in for using IronRuby. The most obvious places for people to start using ruby are RSpec (when it works OTB) and rake as a replacement for nant or msbuild scripts. Of course if you ask me then there are plenty of other reasons to use IronRuby like Silverlight and WPF.

For the people that are interested in my presentation you can download it from [google code](http://ugialtnet3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ironruby/Ruby_loves_dotNet.pptx). Most of the code that I’ve showed is included in the presentation as notes.
All in all I had a great time and I hope the italian community will invite me again some time . Italy has the benefit that they have great food and wine and that makes it very easy to convince me to take the plane

I couldn’t show everything because I got carried away at one point and lost track of time. So I had to drop my demo’s about using bacon (as a replacement for RSpec) to start writing specs for your .NET code today. I also wanted to show some of the stuff [Jimmy Schementi](http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/) did with [Silverlight](http://silverlight.net) and [IronRuby](http://ironruby.net). Like [agdlr](http://github.com/jschementi/agdlr) and the integration for [Ruby on Rails](http://rubyonrails.org) he created with the [silverline plugin](http://github.com/jschementi/silverline). But unfortunately I ran out of time before I could show off some of those things.

I had the opportunity to talk to the Italian member of the Mono team, [Massimiliano Mantione](http://primates.ximian.com/~massi/blog/). And this is what I love about conferences, they are full of interesting people with all kind of ideas. When I go to an event like TechEd or something I generally don’t actually attend many sessions because most of that content is available online anyway. Instead I will roam the hallways etc in search of good conversations and intersting people. Meeting the member of the mono team made me slightly envious because he’s doing what I would love to be doing too He’s working from home and getting paid to work on FOSS. He mentioned some intersting stuff the mono guys are doing and explained from a high level how they got the C# eval to work.

Some other notable facts about how they did the conference, which I liked a lot. The conference is free to attend, but they did have the possibility to accept donations. It were those donations that paid for my flight over here . The way they organized the conference was in an Open Spaces format which is very open for discussion and they were completely transparent as to how the money had been spent. They still had some money left and donated that to an open source project. The open source project was chosen through voting.

The open source projects on the list of possibilities were:

• [Castle/Monorail](http://castleproject.org)
• [Rhino.Mocks](http://ayende.com/projects/rhino-mocks.aspx)
• [Ninject](http://ninject.org)
• [Spark View Engine](http://dev.dejardin.org/)
• [MbUnit/Gallio](http://www.gallio.org/)

In the end it was Rhino.Mocks that won the vote and they have received the donation.

I would like to thank the organizers of the conference for having me and the people that followed my talk for not falling asleep.

I just finished my session at Boot Camp. A code camp organised on the south island in Christchurch.

I’d like to thank everybody for coming to listen to me, and I’d like to thank Ivan Towlson for his help on getting me started with wpf and for elaborating on the section mixins during my talk.

As promised I’ve put my slides and demos online.

Powerpoint 2003 version
Powerpoint 2007 version

Demo

Hope to see you again soon!