by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/11/21 14:36 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/11/21/1113205.aspx
So, it's now over and tomorrow I am flying back to Redmond. The talks were done last Thursday at IUC #30 and I even posted about some of the exciting things I mentioned in the keyboard presentation.
But interestingly, of the two:
Keyboards on Win32: Beyond the Keyboard Layout Creator
Sorting It All Out: More Words on Collation
The keyboard presentation was not my favorite; the one I enjoyed most was the sorting talk. :-)
Just before the talk someone asked me what I would be covering and whether it was advanced or not; I told her she might leave happy.
The presentation was actually an experiment for me, and not something I had ever really fully done before. My intro that I did before starting the presentation proper (these are not even close to the exact words I used but its what I practiced so I believe I said something like this -- attendees should feel free to confirm or refute this!):
I'll admit that is not a typical talk for me. In years past I'd do presentations with Cathy Wissink that would sound really freaking boring [I had to pause for the laughs here] but we'd announce exciting releases, like for Microsoft Layer for Unicode or Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. I think people started realizing that the more boring the talk sounded, the more reason they had to attend. [More laughs]
Anyway, today I am not doing any of that. In fact, I will probably talk more about stuff that we did not end up doing, or shipping in Vista, including some stuff we might have really wanted to. [more laughs]
In prior years some people would feel the talk was too basic, and others would feel that it was too advanced. I don't know what to do with that [more laughs!] but this time I decided I would start with some really basic stuff and then move into stuff that is very advanced, intentionally. My goal is to make sure that nobody leaves happy. [more laughter!]
Anyway, then I launched in and did the presentation. I was really "on" that afternoon, and sure I'll look at the feedback later but I had a whole bunch of people (including the person who talked to me before the talk) come up and tell me they loved it. So maybe I should do more of that!
Anyway, after I get back I'll be talking a lot about TableDrivenTIP stuff, including Vista versions of all of the prior samples I posted. I just wanted to pause and mention to those of you who enjoyed listening to that second presentation that I enjoyed doing it, tremedously....
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