Surprise presentation at DevDays 2007 NL

maarten — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:29:00 GMT

Today I went to DevDays 2007 here in Amsterdam, the Netherlands where I live to meet Mike Hernandez and talk to him some more about VSTO. Mike was scheduled to do three presentations at the Dutch DevDays 2007 conference:

For the second session (all descriptions on the links are in Dutch) Mike unexpectedly asked me to make his second presentation a duo presentation where I could show the audience the improvements that will arrive in Visual Studio 2008 (AKA Orcas) on the topic of VSTOs SharePoint Workflow implementation Visual Studio 2008.

I had to check my 'demo' notebook (I bought myself a brand new Dell Inspiron for the purpose of doing presentations and prototyping in Virtual PCs) to see if I had my workflow presentation available.

I found my workflow presentation where I show a comparison between SharePoint Workflow in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 using the VSTO features and took that last part from that presentation where I show the workflow implementation Visual Studio 2008.

I felt that I was really pushing my luck today:

Unprepared presentation
Did not bring my notebook battery (borrowed one from the preceding speaker Alex Thissen - thanks for that!)
Tried to do it in English to keep the session recording completely in one language
The date for the presentation was the 13th :-S

So there I was up on stage with Mike Hernandez from the US VSTO team, and me in the role of 'SME' (Subject Matter Expert) to show of my SharePoint Workflow 'skills'.

The presentation turned out ok, the demos worked as they should work, even though using the Beta1 version for Visual Studio 2008. That version is most likely to break as it is nowhere near final, but we pulled it off.

Thursday I will celebrate my daughters birthday before she is going to school, try to catch the third session from Mike and maybe a few other sessions and then get back home for the rest of the birthday celebration when she is returned from school. When all the birthday guests returned to their homes i'll do some work on running projects that I have to finish for my daily job. Work goes on ... no holding back there. Busy busy busy... I hardly get any sleep the last few weeks.

Maarten van Stam - Soft As In Software :-) : Software, Visual Studio, DevDays, Microsoft

Surprise presentation at DevDays 2007 NL