On the 28th October (Cape Town) and the 31st October (Johannesburg) – TechDays will be happening. This one day, laser focused event is awesome for developers and IT pros to get an update of what is hot & what is not.

I am very proud to be speaking at the event again this year. I will be doing two talks:

• Build Modern Business applications using Lightswitch
• What’s new in ASP.NET

This is a great event, since it is very cheap, takes just a day and the day is very focused. Check out the website & I will so you there!

This week’s award for more ungrateful behaviour goes to Greg Young, who seems to think that being a speaker at an event makes him special. The story is that Greg went to TechEd North America as a speaker, with multiple talks to present. His wife joined him on the day of his first talk, but the organisers wouldn't let her into his talk (to take photos of him) for free. He then cancelled all his talks at TechED NA and also cancelled his talk at TechEd Europe, in response to the on the ground staff not accommodating him.

All that is right

I FULLY agree with him that the TechEd NA people on the ground could've & should've been handled it way better (I would've just let his wife in) and his suggestions on how they could've done it better (find his wife and take to the speakers room/Starbucks for example) are totally correct.

As he said in his post, this was the last in a bad experience for him as a speaker:

• Problems with flights (costs & times)
• Booking for other events that didn't take into account flights etc...

And so on, and you know what? HE IS RIGHT, that was a bad experience, which no one (speaker, delegate or staff) should have to deal with. It seems that TechED NA was badly organised and I believe he is correct in his view that it is caused by it having many parts working independently and those parts not having authority to make things happen without 900 billion meters of red tape. His first three points of issues are spot on and ALL conferences should learn from him.

All that is wrong

If I agree so much with him, why do I have an issue with his behaviour? It is four points:

1. Greg says "Speakers are not commodities, they are people who are giving much to help the conference" - I am sorry Greg, but speakers are commodities. We are there to help the conference succeed & serve the audience. Nothing is more important than serving the audience & cancelling your talk shows that you think your situation is more important than that. And if you not willing to do that, tough - you will be replaced... just like a commodity.
2. Speaking at an event like TechED NA, plus talking on Channel 9 is an honour & should be approached as such. There are hundreds if not thousands that would put up with a lot more bad experiences to have that opportunity. Wasting it is a slap in the face to the many people that could've & would've done the talk.
3. Being a speaker is about planning - talks that fail are mostly due to lack of planning. Greg has a responsibility to ensure his planning, which includes where his family will be during his talk, is done ahead of time with the right people & not with the people on the ground at the last minute. Planning is a corner stone to professional speaking. I am sure someone involved knew his wife was coming (they booked her flights) but that doesn’t mean everyone involved knew (a conference like this is massive, with hundreds of moving parts). I can also see the staff making the assumption that his wife joined him in the city but wouldn’t attend the conference. At the end of the day it is his responsibility to plan with the right people ahead of time to make sure everything works out.
4. Now, the most important point of this entire post: Let's assume his only choice was to cancel that talk, as he had to do what is right for his wife and go and tell her (leaving her alone for 2 hours would be rough). I would not see that cancelled talk as an issue, and I would not have written this. The single biggest reason I believe his behaviour is award winningly bad is he cancelled the rest of his talks too! There is no reason other to do that, than to stamp his authority and view of being special. He has even cancelled his talk at a different Microsoft conference?! Who is that hurting? The people that are measured for the success & the staff of TechEd NA & Europe are different! That behaviour is unprofessional and deserving of an award. Cancel the one talk, sort things out with the wife & then go and serve the audience - that is what he should’ve done.

Final Thoughts

I speak at Microsoft events all the time but I have never spoken at TechEd NA. I have never met Greg and only know him from a few tweets, his amazing CodeBetter posts and this story and I think he must be amazingly bright if he gets the chance to speak at TechEd. I am not suggesting otherwise, I am talking about his behaviour in this situation. I am not even suggesting this is his normal behaviour, it may just be him grumpy & irrational from the jetlag & lack of sleep he mentions at the start of the blog post, but in that case rather admit you were wrong & don’t post a blog post like that.

Today I got to present to the ever amazing audience at JSinSA (it is one of my favourite conferences, so I may be biased). The talk I gave was very simple: Visual Studio, it is THE BEST tool for web developers, regardless of what technology you use. So if you use ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby, CoffeeScript etc... it does not matter – Visual Studio is right for you!

If you attended and are looking for the slides, demo bits, or a script of the demo – have a look below! For those who couldn’t be there, I have since done a recording of it to YouTube, which is also below!

YouTube

Slides

I ♥ JSinSA – it is easily on the best conferences in South Africa and every year I learn a lot at the event! The importance of JavaScript development has never been so high – this is the time to attend this event! So to help you get to the event, I am giving away one free ticket to the event!

All you need to do to enter, is simply tweet about this: Tweet

Details:

• The tweet must include my Twitter name (@rmaclean) and the hash tag #jsinsa – to be valid
• The competition closes at midnight on 17th May 2013.
• I will contact the winner after the competition closes to arrange the delivery of the ticket.
• This is one free ticket – you have to get to the event yourself.
• This is a standard ticket – so you get everything a normal attendee to the event gets.
• I am using Beeliked to run this so any issues about draw or technical stuff, see their website.
• If I completely get this tech wrong, then I will pick a winner at random.
• Judges (aka me) decision is final.
• If you are making your own tweet, make sure the hashtag (#jsinsa) & the mention do not have characters following them, like a comma or full stop or the system seems not pick them up correctly. Easier - just hit the button above.

Today I presented at TechEd Africa 2013 the first of my talks which is a massive two hour overview of what is new in .NET 4.5 & VS 2012! If you click more (below) you will be able to grab the slides, demos & my demo script if you are wanting to see what I was doing.

For those who could not attend, part one is very similar to this presentation what I did last year!

With TechEd fast approaching, I have been asked a few times who are interesting presenters to see. That is always a tough problem to answer since it depends on what you like. One group of people who are always great are Microsoft MVPs, although I maybe biased, and there are a few presenting at TechEd.

(Click the names – they take you to their TechEd profiles which has, links to blogs etc… & a list of their talks)

• Almero Steyn - Identity Management
• Colin Dembovsky – ALM
• Hilton Giesenow – SharePoint
• Nicolas Blank - Exchange
• Robert MacLean - ALM
  
  

• Rudi Grobler - was Windows Phone
• Peter Willmot - was SQL

In a few short weeks I will be speaking at TechEd Africa 2013 and if you have come to my talks before (previous TechEd’s, TechDays, Hogshead when I have had one too many) you may see that I am giving similar sounding content – so why should you come to these TechEd talks? What will be new and awesome? I am going to give you an honest review of what you can expect from the three talks below.

Windows Store Apps, Tips & Tricks from the field

This is a brand new talk, filled with awesome new content for people developing apps for Windows 8 today & going forward to the Windows ‘Blue’ world. Some of this is from Windows Store app Development Snack series but not all of it, especially in the architecture & tooling sections of the talk.

Note: This is not an introduction to Windows Store apps talk – I will assume the audience has some of the concepts of apps already. So for example, I will talk about background tasks but not explain what they are or where they used in any depth.

What’s new in .NET 4.5 & VS 2012

Same title as my TechDays talk and really this is the version 2 of that talk. So what can you expect different from TechDays?

• Part 1 is very similar, in fact you could probably just watch the YouTube video of that part & get 95% of the content. I will have some new tricks, especially since we have two updates to VS available now & I have adjusted the emphasis in some places – but that is the only changes in part 1.
• Part 2 is very different, both the WCF & LightSwitch sections are gone! LightSwitch was dropped because I have an hour long talk just on that :) WCF was dropped since the demo’s were not great and despite it being an amazing tool, the focus for the talk needs to be what’s new – and the new way for API’s is WebAPI. Do not read that as WCF is dead – hardly, just it doesn’t meet this talks requirements. This means I freed up a lot of time, so I am filling it with A LOT of new ASP.NET content. I will show you tricks & tips in ASP.NET land that will blow your mind away!

What’s new in LightSwitch

This session is vastly different my previous LightSwitch talks – we will start in roughly the same way and look at what it does however rather than 1 hour on that, we do a higher level treatment of that in 20min.  So if you never have seen LightSwitch – I am ensuring you are catered for. That is followed by a quick view of the new stuff and then finally we look to the future and the amazing new items coming down the line.

This talk is aimed at those who have never seen LightSwitch, those who have & those we are using it and want to see where it is headed – so basically everyone :)

In 2010, I wrote a post about how to find the best sessions at TechEd, which is as valid then as it is now… Except for one thing, the decoding sessions part:

Every session at Tech·Ed has a code, and this code has some key information that will mean you get to the right sessions easily. If I look at one of the sessions I am presenting, the code associated is APS309, but what does that mean?

• APS – This is the track, or the high level concept that the session is part of. APS in this case refers to Application Server. Microsoft has a great guide to all these TLA (three letter acronyms) on the technical track page. The only item missing from there is WTB, which stands for Whiteboard which I will cover next.
• 3 – This digit is key, it identifies the level of the session and is between 1 and 4.
  • 1 indicates a introduction session - where you can come in with zero knowledge on the topic. Expect it not to be deep, expect the pace to be slow and expect it to cover the concepts.
  • 2 indicates a beginner session - you should’ve seen something on it before arriving. Expect it to cover usage scenarios and the pace and depth to be increased.
  • 3 indicates a technical session – you should be working with the technology. These often go fast and deep or explore a new area in that space.
  • 4 indicates a deep dive – you should expect a session that is for the most advanced of people.
• 09 – This is a unique identifier.

TechEd this year still has the little codes that help you identify what the talk is about. However you will NOT find any sessions of the level 100 type (that first digit). This doesn’t mean there are no introduction sessions, far from that. What happened is that someone at Microsoft has decided that all level 100 will be reclassified as level 200’s as well. So when you look at the codes, and you see a level 200 session: it could be a introduction or beginner level talk.

This means that the next piece of advice from that post is even more important this year in ensuring the talks you attend are the right talks for you!

The next thing about understanding is to read the abstract for the topic, this is the overall plan for the session. So if we take my session again, the title is: Intro to Workflow Services and Windows Server AppFabric however if you read the abstract you will note that it mentions Workflow Foundation (WF) first and talks about developers using it. Then it mentions WF and usage with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and how they integrate in .NET 4. Finally it mentions AppFabric and hosting.

As TechEd is fast approaching, I thought it would be a great time to share some tricks I will be using  to make my technical presentations a success. These are five tricks that focus on technical presentations on Windows and they include:

• ZoomIt: An essential tool to focus the audience & magnify content
• Turning off Windows 8 notifications
• Turning on HIGH PERFORMANCE mode in Windows, so everything runs amazingly
• Turning off presenter view in PowerPoint 2013
• The amazing PresentOn option in Visual Studio, which makes VS look amazing on stage!

Download links:

• ZoomIt Download: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx
  Pro Power Tools Download:  http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3a96a4dc-ba9c-4589-92c5-640e07332afd

I got some great news today that Colin from Imaginet will be running a fantastic two day course at Bytes in Midrand soon (19th & 20th November). 

Attached is the pamphlet for the event – which I highly urge you to have a look at and attend!