January 6, 2004
@ 03:47 PM
Comments [5]
To demo or not to demo?

Are you going to one of the Longhorn Developer Preview events or Developer Days 2004 events around Europe end of this month or beginning of February?

If you are, I have a question for you. I’ll be talking about Indigo and I am in a demo dilemma. My slide deck, like the ones that Steve, Joe, Don and the others showed at PDC, reflects mostly the status quo of the Indigo M5 milestone that is currently in development. The problem is that there are no M5 bits that I could show (there are not even M5 bits I could get). The PDC Longhorn build contains the Indigo milestone M4, whose programming model is very different – the “final” programming model for all of us happens to be added only in M5; whatever is in M4 is really an “internal” programming model that exists for testing purposes.

So what should I do? Spend more time explaining how things are going to be in the real thing (M5 and going forward into the Beta) or spend that time on doing M4 demos? Personally, I’d rather cut the demos entirely or show simply what needs to be done to get the SDK samples to run so that you have a starting point if you really want to play with the early bits. Make yourself heard; comment here.

Categories: EMEA Longhorn Preview
Tracked by:
http://benjaminm.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=226523de-a8bd-4320-8a65-e757a2d47b23 [Pingback]
« Back to Business | Home | More event dates »
Wednesday, January 07, 2004 1:10:20 AM UTC
Personally I ended up skipping the demos when I did my Indigo presentation. Mainly because the information I presented was M5 specific.

Further, I focused on the Service Model level not the Connector level, as I expect most people to utilize the former. Anyways, as far as I know not to much of the Service Model works in M4, and it’s fairly different from the M5 information presented at the PDC.

Quite frankly I didn’t expect people to install Longhorn to work with this stuff, so the incompatibility with M4 didn’t feel like a large problem.

So I ended up with some code snippets in PowerPoint, as people love to see code, and mixed it up with a few animations and drawings. And I’m still happy with the decisions I made…

Good luck :)
Morten Abrahamsen
Wednesday, January 07, 2004 7:32:46 AM UTC
Hi Clemens,

Even though I cannot see you live (I'll be presenting a parallel session at the Dutch Developer Days at the same time you are doing yours), I still hope to catch you on a webcast. There I would rather hear you tell your insights on the stuff that's probably going to be in the release. That seems better than seeing demos on code that's not going to make it anyway. Some code fragments would keep my programmer-appetite satisfied.
Hope to meet you in The Hague. Have fun on your tour.

Alex
Alex Thissen
Wednesday, January 07, 2004 7:56:41 AM UTC
Stick with the M5 material; Personally, I could give a rat's ass about the M4 model.The new model seems much more intuitive and will allow the developers to grasp the core concepts of Indigo better then showing demos with M4. Plus I wouldn't be able to stand hearing "MessageBus" over and over and doubt your audience would either. Good Luck.
Dave Bettin
Wednesday, January 07, 2004 9:45:12 PM UTC
Unless you can make a convincing argument that M4 is a really good transition from the past to understanding the future, I do not see what value it has for those of us not doing PhD's in LongHorn history. My vote is on "Spend more time explaining how things are going to be in the real thing ".
Peter
Monday, January 12, 2004 3:10:13 PM UTC
Hi,

Personally, I think a demo is the best way to show what we can expect from Longhorn. However, if the stuff you can demo to us is not near what we can expect to be the end-result, then don't show it. Stick with the latest you got, and give us the best idea of what we can expect. See you next week in The Hague!
Harmen
Comments are closed.