For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.
Today’s work focused on the final reference demo for my presentation. For this presentation I need two, first a simple one to get the basic concepts understood and then a second which is much more complex and tougher for me to code. This is not quick task as just this reference demo took me almost 6 hours to get it to the point I was happy. Often during the building of the reference demo’s two side effects occur. The first is that I am learning, so I get the chance to find solutions and blog about them.
The second side effect, is that it makes me think of what sort of questions will be asked during the presentation. It is very important to spend time thinking about this, because while things may seem obvious to me they may not be to other people. Remember that your presentation doesn’t end with the slides – questions afterwards are part of it too and you need to prepare for them.
One of the ways I research is to post questions to StackOverflow
Once I have the reference demos built, I can then take that and build a new application from it – this new application will be the core for the actual demos. This is a tough exercise because I need to separate out the important code from the the bit’s that are needed but do not help enlighten the audience. For example if I had a WinForms app as a base for a demo, I will often have the UI built but I will not have all the events hooked up.
The next step is to figure out the the best way to explain the important code, that could mean typing it in during the demo, copy and paste or even simple un-commenting of code – what ever works best for the scenario as each has various trade offs. After I have done this exercise, I will have one fully developed application and one shell of an application for each demo.
What the reference demo code looks that I built earlier
What the demo shell for the same code looks like – note much less code, not comments etc… a clean slate.
Once I had finished my application base today I went back to the slide deck again. It is quickly changing from being a story board to becoming a slide deck as I work on the content and flow more. For this presentation I can feel I am over the big hump of “what” and starts to come together quicker.
Slide deck at the end of day 3