A Blog for Graymad

Scott's presentations are always fun, but the ASP.NET Whidbey session he describes in his blog looks to be more content than a human mind can safely absorb without cranial damage. :-)

...running Windows Mobile 2002 (thanks to Scoble for the link to Amazon's page for the phone, complete with a $150 rebate). It was time for a new phone for my wife, and since I can also use the phone to test out SmartPhone development, this one made a lot of sense. And given the rebate, the price was right. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile 2002 does not appear to support .NET, but hopefully Motorola will eventually support an upgrade to WM 2003, which does. If not, well, I've used the eMbedded tools before...

The only bummer is that it won't arrive in time for me to take it with me to PDC. What fun is it getting a new toy (ahem...a new phone for your wife) if you can't show it off? :-)

Anybody else have a SmartPhone in their future? Let me know via the comments...

Working with the samples for my upcoming pre-conference talk on ASP.NET for the PDC, I got to wondering whether there's a dominant preference among conference attendees regarding how presenters work with code. Do you prefer to have a presenter write the code live, or do you prefer to have the presenter show a pre-written example, and explain how the important parts work?

For example, live demos take a lot more work to get right, but I can see some advantage to walking attendees through a process, rather than reviewing code with them. On the other hand, using pre-written demos generally allows for more demos within a given presentation, since inevitably some of the code that would need to be written for a live demo is really not relevant to the concepts being explained.

I'd like to hear what you think. Let me know in the comments, or via the contact link, as I'm eager to base my demo style on what real attendees want, rather than what I assume they want or what works best for me as a presenter. The reality is that I'm likely to end up with somewhat of a hybrid style, but to the extent that I can accommodate attendee's desires, I want to do that.

For those of you who've never heard of them, there's a couple of guys by the name of Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell who run a site called Sysinternals. Sysinternals provides some of the most useful utilities available for Windows (NT, 2000, XP, etc. - don't tell anyone, but they've also got some for Linux, too). Developers and admins alike should definitely keep this site in their favorites list.

In the process of preparing for my PDC pre-conference session with Jeff Prosise (we're doing sort of a tag-team approach throughout the day), I've been keeping a list of presentation tips from some of the folks who I know to be the best speakers in the business (either from personal experience or based on their reputation). Here's a list of links to stuff that I've found. I hope that I'm able to live up to the confidence that Microsoft has shown in having me present, and I'm sure that these tips will help.

From recent experience...

I'm in the process of digitizing a whole mess of Christmas albums that my wife had growing up. This involves hooking up a turntable to my laptop (I'm using a new Audio-Technica AT-PL50 that I picked up for just $99, which includes a built-in preamp so you don't need a receiver or mixer to record from it), and using the Analog Recorder tool from Plus! Digital Media Edition to record the audio, split it into tracks, name the album/tracks, and filter out pops and hissing. The Analog Recorder creates WMA files at whatever bitrate you choose.

Thanks to Kent Sharkey, who runs the MSDN ASP.NET Developer Center, my article on design-time support for ASP.NET server controls is now up on the MSDN site. Any questions, comments, or suggestions for future articles are welcome in the comments section below, or via the contact link to the left.