Tonight I got a call from Geoff about Vista.  He'd seen the photos that I put up earlier which showed the Readify guys having an impromptu Vista training session.  Geoff was ringing to see whether or not I could call in on my way home and show some of the Vista stuff to his guys.  I immediately fixed my mind into preparing for what I knew would be a gruelling hour or so of being hammered by the best of the best.

Things started out pretty much the same way that they have the first couple of times that I've given this talk.  This is where I really set the scene for what WinFX is all about and let the audience make the association between what they know today and what we'll be dealing with tomorrow.  I started well; full of confidence; didn't miss a beat.

After the intro I got right into the WPF stuff, explaining to the audience about the unified stack and how easy it is to work with 2D and 3D graphics - not to mention documents!  The audience was pretty quiet and so I knew that this was going to be an easy night.  I worked through the main WPF scenarios and moved right on in to XAML - these guys are eating right out of my hands now, this is a cinch :-)

At the end of my talk on XAML I gave my famous spinning textbox demo and waiting to hear the "ooohhhhs" from the audience.  Nothing.  Total silence!  Then Rudder spoke up: "What's this spinning textbox stuff?" he said.  "We won't be using any spinning textboxes in this organization.  Show us some real stuff!", he demanded.  Wow, things were getting tough.  So I drilled in deeper and deeper.  I was really beginning to work up a sweat now.  This is where presenting get's exciting.  You are literally living on the edge; captive to the mood of the audience.  The adrenallin was now flowing. I put my head down and got stuck right into it - Man, I love this stuff. 

I pressed on through WPF and the audience was now engaged in the presentation and back on side.  Maybe Rudder had done me a favor by warming the audience up I thought.  I pressed on ahead through WCF; explaining how Indigo unified the model for building messaging services and how we no longer have to deal with the separate object models of Remoting, ASMX, WSE, and System.Messaging.  The audience was on edge.  Hanging on my every word.

Things progressed beyond WCF and into the wonders of Workflow with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), after which we headed straight in to some hands on labs.  Here's a shot of the guys working through some of the labs:

At the end of the night things worked out really well.  Rudder, Channel 9, VSGuy and Tablet lead the applause. 

Wow!  What an amazing crowd.  A night that I'll never forget!