Aaron Lerch

Well, it’s done.

I presented on Windows PowerShell last night at Indianapolis .NET Developers Association meeting. Considering it was my first-ever presentation to a group anywhere close to that size (technical or otherwise), I thought it went very well. Feedback was good, including some constructive criticism, which I wholeheartedly agreed with. Considering my audience (developers who likely don’t live on the command line like my co-workers and I tend to–which isn’t a bad thing) I unintentionally spent too much time covering using the command-line and not enough time doing the demos on writing cmdlets or hosting powershell in apps, etc. Live and learn, I always say! The biggest lesson I learned? Going barefoot while presenting is a Good Thing^TM. It made me feel so much more at ease. Ahhh, bare feet.

If you were there, or are just interested, you can download my illustrious PointPoint presentation and demo code. Note that I’m not a huge fan of a lot of PowerPoint slides in technical presentations, so you’ll see that I really only have 2 content slides (and use of the word “content” is questionable).

Presentation (Office 2007 format)
Presentation (Office 200x format)
Demo code/scripts

Due to the really short time I had to prepare, I’d like to say a huge thanks to Jeffrey Snover for his Start-Demo script (and some example demos using it), David Aiken for his “DFO Show” walk-throughs (and associated code), Lee Holmes for his “MSH Logo” app, and Scott Hanselman for some presentation advice (including responding to some extra questions I had). I totally hijacked their stuff, but did give full credit for it.
Note that I’m including my “tweaked” versions of their applications here, for all to enjoy. But all credit goes to them for originally creating it–I hardly did anything to it, literally. You guys all saved me, thanks!