SADev

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

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.

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

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.

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

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?

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

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

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

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

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

For the rest in the posts in this series please see the series index.

So today marks the first full day on this presentation, yesterday I only invested about 4 hours work into the solution. Most of today was spent on building the reference for my demo’s. This is a functioning demo system that includes many ideas and concepts and is something I build on. This code won’t be the actual demo code because once I have this I can break it down and  build my actual demo’s off it.

The reference demo gives me an opportunity to take my ideas, try them out, learn a lot about the issues and enables me to cherry pick scenarios for actual demos. For this presentation the core idea for my demo’s is working what prime numbers are there below a specified ceiling number. To start I coded the solution without any threading, then figured out various different ways of using threads and thread pools to enable threading.

Coding demo’s away in Visual Studio 2010

Seems that in the last week, and just in time for me to be in Canada where they have bandwidth, that a bunch of things have become available for download which deserve your attention:

VS 2010 Quick Reference Guidance is now out!

Plus hotfix 1 for it

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Upgrade Guidance is now out!

The new Nokia 5800 firmware (40.0.0.5) is out – which brings it up to the level of the X6 in features now!

Lastly, and sneakily at the end of this post, my latest open source tool is out. Now I am not going to tell you what it is, but it is for presenters (mostly) and requires .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and Windows 7. Hopefully the name will entice you to check out Rule 18!