Silverlight Assault Course

We are running a Silverlight Assault Course in Poole (Dorset, England) on Saturday the 26th of July.

Places are limited to 20 people and we have only a few places left. At £40 a person, this is serious value for money.

The day is going to be seriously fun!

Sign up just now before the final places go

Silverlight Encryption Screencast

Following on from yesterdays posts on Silverlight Encryption, i have now produced a screencast on it. You can View the screencast from here.

I hope you enjoy it, hopefully as time goes by my screencasting should both improve in quality and increase in frequency.

Beta 2

I've also just realised that the machine I built the Encryptor sample was still running Beta 1, so I've now update the online sample and the code to Beta 2.

You can view the online sample here, or download the code from my Skydrive

Fest08 – What a blast

I was at the superb NxtGenUG Fest08 yesterday. I have to say this was one of the best conferences I’ve been too.

Session Highlights:

Oliver Sturm – F# – Superb overview of F# (something that i play with in my spare time occasionally)

Josh Twist’s Expression Blend Demo – best designer demo I’ve seen from a developer.

Who’s Session is it anyway – another NxtGen gameshow. What a hoot!

Day Highlights

Although coordinators can’t win prizes (I’m one of the Cambridge region coordinators). My nugget in Birmingham was top rated nugget for the year, My nugget in Coventry was rated 2nd top nugget. And my session with Richie Costall was rated 2nd best session in Cambridge (Daniel Moth was first).

It was also great to see Daniel Moth do his swansong nugget before he heads to Redmond.

I was asked very last minute to do a grok talk (which seemed to go down very well).

Big Thanks to Rich, Dave and John for putting together a brilliant day.

Silverlight 2 Unplugged (Bristol)

I am in Bristol tomorrow at the .NET Developer Network (DotNetDevNet) User Group presenting Silverlight 2 Unplugged.

Anyways, I think it's going to be a fun night and I hope to see you there

Back from SQLBits 2

I was up at SQLBits in Birmingham yesterday.

I had a fantastic time and seen some great sessions, namely Andras, Mike Taulty and Andrew Fryer. Unfortunately I couldn't stay until the end (which is a shame as I wanted to see Tony Rogersons session).

It was nice to catchup with loads of folks and I had a lot of very kind people who have seen me present chat to me and say very nice things. I just want to say a quick thanks to those people i spoke to, its great to get such feedback as it inspires you to do more sessions.

As it was yesterday the sqlbits folks were short of Grok Talks, so I put together a quick 10 minute session on using Linq To Sql, Paging in Linq to SQL and the application name in connection strings. I really did throw it together with no practice, so I hope those people who saw my grok talk enjoyed it.

Another big mention must go to Colin Angus Mackay who did two grok talks that day. Well done Colin!

Anyways thanks to all at SQLBits for putting together such a great day (and i wish i could have stayed to the end).

Silverlight Southampton Slides

I've posted up my slides for my silverlight in southampton session last night, you can download them from my Skydrive

Back from Southampton

I'm back from last nights Silverlight Session in Southampton.

I spent 2 full hours live coding the session. No Slides, Virtually No Cutting and Pasting. Just pure coding. And from what I can tell it went down a storm. I really enjoyed the event, much preferred the new format to the sessions I have done in the past. I also think everybody enjoyed seeing everything being coded live.

We really covered a lot in this session, and suprised that i managed to pack so much in. There were a couple of hitches (one of the things with live coding, no matter how much you prepare), and again I have a couple of lessons learned, but I am really really pleased with this session.

I think it safe to say, I can put my disastrous DDD sessions behind me. I have now done 3 main sessions since then, and they have all went really well. One of them in is currently in the NxtGenUG all time top 10.

I have only been speaking since september, and every session is a learning experience, and I think I am improving each time.

Just to say a big thanks to Rich and John at Southampton for supporting a relatively new speaker, and well done guys, what a great group you guys have (very impressed).

Also a big thanks to Guy Smith-Ferrier for putting me forward to John and Rich to do a session in Southampton. Guy really is one of those superb blokes who really wants to develop UK speakers. After DDD i really felt as if I let folks down (the feedback wasn't that bad, but i knew i could do much better), and I really wanted to get this one right.

Anyways enough waffle.

Thanks Southampton for coming to the session, and the code will be up later today

Silverlight in Southampton

Tonight I'm off to the coast, ice creams and bucket&spade for me.

That's right I'm presenting Silverlight for NxtGenUG in Southampton.

I've not been down to southampton yet but I have met the coordinators (John and Richie), who are both top blokes.

If you're in the area you should still be able to register.

Silverlight Christmas Source

I have just uploaded the source for my section of the Silverlight Christmas session we did at NxtGenUG Cambridge and Coventry.

You can now download the source from here

Last Night in Cambridge

Last night in Cambridge myself and Richie did our Silverlight Christmas session again.

I think it went really well once more. It was nearly a little bit of a panic as the projector knackered up, and it was looking very bad for us indeedy.

In the end, Rachel and Ben of Red Gate were superb once more, and managed to find us another room with a projector.

We started late, and finished late (and didn't cover everything we wanted to), but in the end I think it went very well.

One thing that was very weird (this does not happen on my laptop, but i was using Richies laptop), Isolated Storage between Internet Explorer and Firefox seemed to be sharing with each other. This made me look like a little bit of a pillock as I did say it wouldn't share (and it doesn't on my laptop). So I think i need to look into this a little more and find out what happened.

Thanks to everyone who turned up, and have a Merry Christmas and see you next year.

Silverlight Christmas in Coventry

Myself and Rich, did a joint session on Silverlight in Coventry last night for nxtgen.

What a great night, i had to admit i had a brilliant time, and just laughed myself silly with Rich. It was a very light hearted evening, not going into Silverlight in too much depth, but trying to cover lots of little nuggets and demos.

Rich had built an amazing Silverlight advent calendar to give away Swag and pick the demos :)

My only complaint is that due to time constraints (there was also a nugget on), I didn't get to do as many of my demos as I would have liked, there were more of Richies :( , and therefore it got a little rushed towards the end.

However it was a great evening, and I am looking forward to Cambridge tonight, where we do the same session but with more time.

Silverlight Christmas (NxtGenUG Cambridge) (Me and Rich)

Tuesday 11 December 2007

I'm dreaming of a...NxtGenUG Cambridge: St Johns Innovation Centre, Cowley Road, Cambridge

I'm dreaming of a Silverlight Christmas. Just like the ones I used to know. Where the buttons glisten and attendees listen to hear, great demos in the show.I'm dreaming of a Silveright Christmas With every web Page I write. May your devs be merry and bright And may all your pages not be white. I'm dreaming of a Silverlight Demo With Chris and Rich on Stage. May your SWAG be expensive and bright And may all your Pizza be large. Chris Hay and Richard Costall will present a variety of Silverlight nuggets, aimed at highlighting the pitfalls with Silverlight 1.1. This will be a demo heavy session, so fasten your seatbelts.

http://www.nxtgenug.net/viewevent.aspx?eventid=91

Silverlight Christmas (with me and Rich) at Coventry

NxtGenUG: Coventry Region

Monday 10 December 2007

I'm dreaming of a ...NxtGenUG Coventry: Coventry Flying Club, Rowley Road, Coventry

I'm dreaming of a Silverlight Christmas. Just like the ones I used to know. Where the buttons glisten and attendees listen to hear, great demos in the show.I'm dreaming of a Silveright Christmas With every web Page I write. May your devs be merry and bright And may all your pages not be white. I'm dreaming of a Silverlight Demo With Chris and Rich on Stage. May your SWAG be expensive and bright And may all your Pizza be large. Chris Hay and Richard Costall will present a variety of Silverlight nuggets, aimed at highlighting the pitfalls with Silverlight 1.1. This will be a demo heavy session, so fasten your seatbelts.

http://www.nxtgenug.net/viewevent.aspx?eventid=89

DDD6 - Silverlight Samples

I have just posted up my samples for the Intro to Silverlight 1.1 and for the Silverlight Twitter Application.

As I have said in my previous posts, on the day I did not present the way I know I can, however I believe that the samples you have to download are good examples of what you can do with Silverlight.

Feel free to take these samples, expand upon them and build your own applications.

Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging about some of the stuff in the these samples, and some of the cool things you can do.

DDD - Stop showing me Silverlight, build something

Following on from my previous posts http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/2007/11/ddd-intro-to-silverlight.html and http://silverlightuk.blogspot.com/2007/11/ddd-apology.html

This is my evaluation of what went wrong with this session:

• Rattled, and lost confidence (see previous post)
• Sitting down (i should never sit down)
• Tired and Lacked enthusiams (see previous post)
• Never practised this session enough
• Got lost in this session
• Too much code (confused the audience, and me), can't see wood for trees
• I got bored (if I am bored, you guys have no chance)
• Live Coding, and Reference apps were disconnected.
• Flow was wrong
• Not clear what bit of code i was working on

The real problems with this session, was due to the way i had structured this presentation, and how complicated, and ambitious I was.

Without comfort in the tools (for presenting purpose), and with a very different flow, everybody including me got rather lost.

I was boring, and unenthusiastic (due to the events leading upto this presentation).

I have some serious work to do on this, but I am pretty sure this will never happen again.

In future posts, I will discuss how i plan to rectify this in the future.

DDD - Intro to Silverlight

This a list of my points (and some of Guy Smith-Ferriers, John's and Richies points), of what went wrong at this session. I will add to this list when I get feedback.

• I was very tired meaning that I was not enthusiastic as I could be.
• Due to the events on the Friday, I had lost my confidence.
• Vista on my laptop would not work with the projector, which rattled me, and I had to switch to XP.
• Starting 5 minutes late, rattled me (due to projector issues).
• My Laptop wasn't setup to do the demos in XP.
• Vista is much faster than XP, meaning that my samples were being slow, and this rattled me.
• I usually psyche myself for a presentation beforehand, which i never got a chance to do
• I mistakenly agreed for the lights to be switched off, which disconnected my from the audience.
• I frequently switched between the demo, and the code, not giving folks a chance to absorb the code, and the impact of the demo
• It wasn't clear which bit of code I was referring to
• Still a little rushed, may'be packing too much in
• I turned my back to the audience a couple of times
• I got a little lost in my first demo (due to being rattled), and it took me time to get back on track
• I was very nervous
• It was my first ever one hour session, and there is a difference between this and 20 minute sessions
• I never really let my style, and enthusiasm come across, due to the above events

The positives

• I kept to time pretty well, and got across what i wanted to samplewise
• I had a backup copy of XP
• I felt my knowledge of Silverlight really came across
• I think people will come away from this session, and be able to get started with Silverlight

All in all, I was very disappointed with myself, and I know that I can present so much better than I did. However I do have a good list of points that I can really work on to improve my presentations.

The bad news this was my better session, as the following session was a real disaster. I will follow up on what went wrong with this session later.

I still have to post up the samples, which will be later on

DDD Apology

I believe DDD was a great success, and hats of to Guy, Zi, Phil, Craig etc, for organising a great day.

Unfortunately, I must apologise for my sessions. I am highly disappointed in myself, as I know I can present around 1000 times better than i did.

If you attended any of my 2 sessions, I will post up my samples later on today. On a positive note, my samples are good.

I will be critically evaluating, what went wrong for me on the day, and how I will be resolving this in the future for later sessions.

I have learned a lot of lessons, and these sessions were my first ever one hour sessions, and this was my first time presenting at a conference. I do not offer this as an excuse, but just as a contributing factor. The blame lies purely with myself and my lack of experience is just a factor.

For those of you who attended my sessions, i thank you for turning up, and putting up with me. In the future i will resolve these issues (to be posted later), and I know that in my future sessions, I will be giving much better presentations.

Again thanks for coming to my session, and thanks to the guys at DDD (especially Guy Smith-Ferrier, who is an outstanding bloke, a real inspiration, and a real champion for developing UK speakers).

Let the critical evaluation begin........

First draft of DDD sessions finished.

Well, it has been a very long few weeks (especially the past few days).

However, my first version of both presentations I am doing are now ready, yay.

The rest of this week, is just tidyup work, finalising some slides (i only have around 5 per session), finalising the structure, and going through it.

However, it is time to relax.

I have to say, I am particularly pleased with the "Silverlight Twitter" session.

The you choose nugget in Coventry

So I did a nugget in Coventry on Monday night for NxtGenUG. Thanks to Rich for letting me do this nugget.

I think this was my most challenging nugget to date. I had agreed to let the audience choose the nugget they wish to hear the most about any of the new C#3.0 language features and how they work at an IL level.

Not only did I have to prepare 6 nuggets, and only present one, but the presentation skills speaker was on after me. I was more nervous about this nugget, than DDD.

At the end of the night, I was really happy with the way i presented, and the speaker guy was absolutely amazing, and I have learned so much from him, and I am sure DDD will go so much better for it. He was really complimentry, and in the end I am happy and confident about speaking. Unfortunately I wasn't so happy with the subject in the end. I think it was a mistake to let the audience choose the nugget, however it was a great challenge to do so. I guess if you voted for another nugget, you wouldn't be happy that i presented a different one.

I also think the subject was to deep to be doing as a nugget for a user group evening. I think in future, I will keep this as an entire session, which allows me to tackle it (with questions), at a reasonable pace.

However saying that, I was suprised that the feedback (so far) is really good considering.

5x9's
6x8's
3x7's
1x6

Comments:
"great nugget - under a lot of pressure brave man - well done."

"Good stuff on the wrong night. I'm not sure I like to be asked which nugget I want - just feed me the nugget please."

"Enthused, indiviual brave and wears's a loud beach shirt to boot, now that's a guy you want at your next party talking about computers."

"Chris did extremely well to do a nugget off the fly, and managed to give a succinct and clear overview of lambda expressions in a very short space of time. Well done."

"The presentation chris provided was extremely good and interesting to see what is actually going on behind the scenes."

"Well prepared and presented."

"Sorry, just caught the last few minutes of the nugget, but liked what I saw - well done!"

"Very enthusiastic but a bit rushed; Nice shirt!"

" thought the point was being demonstrated (i.e. CLR has not changed) was covered quite well, but the 'show the IL or #1 then for #2' didn't really work so well. It would have been a little better if there were a way to see the IL side-by-side. I accept that the IL is the same, but it wasn't really possible to confirm that with your own eyes as #1 was removed from sight to show #2."

Some really great comments, very constructive, and will really help me improve my sessions. I have only been speaking for 2 months now, so this is really helping me find my style, groove, and preparations.

Thanks again to all the guys in Coventry for being brilliant.

Automatic Properties Nugget Feedback Birmingham

I've got some early feedback in from Dave at NxtGenUG Birmingham.

2 x 9's
3 x 8's
1 x 6

Comments:

"OUtstanding nugget again! Smooth, well presented."
"Good subject for a nugget"
"I don't think there was much discussion on IL. The automatic property was introduced quite decently. The presenter should have delved into some more details especially regarding its implications, in writing better code.. (smell free!).."

I don't expect too much feedback from this nugget as there was only around 15 people at the event. This was the feedback as of Friday.

All in all, I am very pleased with the feedback. I think I am finding my style and way for speaking, and getting more comfortable about it.