SADev

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I write to you today from the back of a bus in Vancouver, Canada! It’s 7h20 in the morning here, although my clock and body are telling it is 17h26. This is the first of two busses and a train I am currently using to get to the Microsoft offices. This is a far cry from my usual sitting in Johannesburg, South Africa traffic! What is going on?

Last year I joined the Rangers projects and as part of that (an unexpected and enjoyable part) is a three week trip to Vancouver, Canada and Redmond, USA. The purpose of this trip was to finish, polish and deliver the TFS Integration Platform adapters I have been working on. At the same time this gave me the opportunity to see what life is like at Microsoft and more broadly in North America!

I had never heard of the shoe bomber before this trip, but this ass has ruined flying to America for the rest of the world. That is my belief after going through airport security. While at OR Tambo Airport (or Johannesburg International), I have never had to take my shoes or belt off for any flights to the countries in Africa I have been. However being an American inbound flight there was an additional check before the flight which was the first of the very many times I would take my shoes off.

The trip itself was from Jo’burg to Atlanta, USA (red line below) then a connecting flight from their to Seattle, USA (blue line) and then finally a bus to Vancouver, Canada (yellow line).

Map from http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps2.htm and pins and lines added by me (not accurately)

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Welcome to the first part of a series of posts which I wrote during and after my Rangers sabbatical. In future posts I will talk about the trip in detail, but this post will just cover the history of the trip and what all these odd terms I may use mean.

The Rangers

The rangers are NOT related to any of the following:

A football team

A TV show

A military group

An ice hockey team

The Rangers are group of individuals which is made up of internal Microsoft staff, mostly from MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services); MVP’s (external people awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award) and key community leads.

The Rangers are linked to a specific Microsoft product, in my case it is VSTS (Visual Studio Team System), and not all products have a Rangers team.

The goal of Rangers is to fill in the gaps in products with custom solutions and guidance – so that may include information on how to run TFS (Team Foundation Server) on a virtual machine, quick reference posters for the product, or additional tools.

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Part of presenting a good presentation is using the right tool for the job. Often that may mean PowerPoint to present content, or demos to help get the point across. Sometimes it means building an entire slide show system out of the technology you are showing off to (as I did with jQuery). In this post I will open my bag of gadgets I tend to use in my presentations.

Now first off, I do not use every gadget in every presentation (right tool for the job again), but these are my favourites which I use often.

Logitech V450 Laser Wireless Mouse

I have a fairly standard wireless mouse from Logitech which is actually a great tool for a presenter, because you can use it to move forward through slides like a slide clicker device from around the room – no more being tied to the table. I can use the mouse wheel to go backwards too. While there are more dedicated mice for this job, a simple wireless does it just fine.

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So the first of the appendixes of this series is an idea I had for the presentation: animate the content of the code slides so it looks like it is being typed. This never made it into the final presentation because each slide change (i.e. changing from one slide to another) causes your audience to lose focus on you a look at the screen. Animation is a powerful tool to help get your point across but you should not be just animating for wow factor, because then the audience will just watch the slides and ignore you.

Anyway for those who can find a good use of this effect, here is how to do recreate it. Note I am using PowerPoint 2010 Beta 2, but this should work in previous versions too.

The above image shows what the slide looks like at the start. The white block is just a normal text block with some text in it. I have turned on the animation pane as I will need it later. First select the text block, and choose the Appear animation effect.

The management at Nokia have scored a big point today with the big announcement in the UK yesterday where they have made Nokia Turn-by-turn FREE. This has solved the headache of paying Nokia for convenience and also showed Nokia is aware and dealing of the moves of the big players like Google.

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So today the visible changes to the slides are minor, the work really revolves around finishing up the demo script and minor cleanup. Today is maybe the most important day of work for a presentation as it is the day I do my first set of dry runs! Dry runs are vital because if you want to be successful you need to practise, practise and practise more.

All this practise is part of preventing the dreaded demo crash! Interestingly the stats on session scores show that demo crashes are one of the biggest causes of low speaker scores so you want to make sure you do what ever you can to prepare for them. On the right is  a tweet that Anu said about no matter how hard you plan to avoid crashes they can catch you. Now it may look unprofessional to have a crash, but in Anu’s case she shows more professionalism because she had a backup in case her demo crashed: the live bits and so she could continue with her demo.

So what do I do for my preparations to make sure my presentations look good and do not crash?

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Today was a very busy day which started off with touching up the slide deck with a little more content and adding touches of animation to the slides. One thing I have learnt is that every time a change happens on screen, be it slide change or animation, the audience looks at that and since people can’t multi-task, they stop listening to you. So while animations and transitions may look flashy they must be used with care or you risk having long pauses or the audience ignoring you.

For this presentation there are a few slides where I want to take the audience step by step through a process as I narrate it to them, however for the rest of the slides there is no animations. Often on very wordy slides people will bring in the content, line by line so that the audience doesn’t get ahead of the speaker. For me I have text, I dump the entire text on the screen at once, which may seem odd since everyone will start reading it. However I would rather have a 5sec pause between slides while people digest the new slide over ten 1sec pauses during the slide as they switch between me and the new text that just appeared courtesy of some animation.

Slide deck at the end of day 5

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What a day, when I said yesterday that I could feel it coming together, I did not expect that it would be so fast and now at the end of day 4 the fundamental slides are done! Changes to point out for those who are watching the slides evolve:

• The slides I mentioned on day 2 that were in danger of going away, are gone.
• I moved the demo’s after the explanations – I have done this because this is such a complicated topic and so I need to do the explaining upfront so that I do not lose people in the demo. Normally I prefer the opposite as it adds more excitement to the presentation.
• Another demo has been added – the slide on debugging I just can’t explain well enough in words so that will be a demo now.
• Added 5 slides with code in, these are a great alternatives to demo’s because they don’t break (like demo’s can), can keep the session moving forward and not getting bogged down in too many demos and animation can help illustrate the code. I am not using animation here but it is an option. The risk of these code slides is that if you only have them, it may bore the audience. For them I am using them to illustrate alternatives to the demo I will do earlier in the presentation, this seem to be the nice trade off between entertaining demos and getting through it all.
• References is hidden now, if people need to see it they can ask or download the slides. No one will be able to copy that many references down during a presentation anyway.

Slides at the end of day 4