It's been a busy weekend, what with sunburn and Developer Day #3. Resplendent in a fetching maroon / wine speakers shirt (which matched my sunburnt face for colour, no photos yet, I had thought Simon, as ever, did snap one, but it turns out he left his camera in the car) I attempted to rattle through the basics of developing asp.net server controls. Rather than being slide based the presentation was code based and it's not until you sit in front of 60 or so people, standing room only, that you realise how fat your fingers are and how bad your typing actually is.

In which is rapidly becoming a feature for the Developer Days the Microsoft branded socks made an appearance. Anyone who's attended any of my previous presentations knows that I use these as punishment goodies during the hour. This time I handed them out to anyone who could spot mistakes as I coded, before I started to build. I went in with six pairs of socks, and gave out 3 for coding errors. The relief you feel when you realise your code will compile in front of an audience is amazing, I even got a request to write bad code to see what would happen. There's the perfect type of audience member, they want to see things break on purpose!. I used the image of Beaker and Dr Bunsen Honeydew as my holding slide for the presentations. The inspiration came from my wee friend Grace (who will object to being called wee no doubt); I think I was identifying with Beaker throughout.

I only managed to get half way through the presentation (the coding took way longer than I had timed myself doing it previously), which was a bit of a let down; I had to skip postback handling and rattle through design time behaviours. If you attended the presentation for those sections my sincere apologies. I've bundled up the presentation, working demo code and my "cheat sheet" for download. The cheat sheet was an attempt to put each of the demos into words, so anyone who didn't make notes can have a shot at recreating the code. I plan to take each section of the presentation and dedicate a blog entry to it, in a shameless attempt to regain my audience after a long hiatus from blogging.

I did purchase one of the Logitech presentation devices and very lovely it was too. It was especially useful when I was standing by the screens and one of the poor people standing at the back of the room leant on the button to roll the screens back into the ceiling. Much hilarity ensued as I stood there watching my presentation slowly retract upwards. A pair of socks was handed out to the guilty party. The MS A/V guy liked the presenter device so perhaps people attending presentations at the Microsoft Campus over the next few months will see them rolled out and presenters coming out from behind the podium.