Summary
I talk about my experience at having presented at the Lang. NET 2006 symposium.

I presented at the Microsoft Lang .NET 2006 Symposium. The slide deck is available here in PDF format.

My presentation didn't go great, primarily due to the fact that I don't have a lot of experience presenting, and tried to cover too many slides. Dennis Hamilton said it very politely:

Christopher Diggins is an enthusiast (his day job is at Microsoft, but not in anything to do with developing languages), so it was a bit more like being at Code Camp. I'm glad he was there. It is a little difficult to present the key concepts and I think this gave him some great practice. (Think Forth with well-defined operators, and everything an object, although I am being simplistic.)

Some people seemed to appreciate the ideas and theory. I had occasion to chat with some very nice people, such as Frank Krueger, Dennis Hamilton, and Markus Lempe, to name a few. I felt like I got the cold shoulder from Microsoft employees, but I am kind of used to that. I find it ironic that I work there, yet so few people know anything about what I do. It probably is related to the fact that my job is writing documentation, and that keeps me isolated.

Some of the other presentations went far too slowly for my liking, or didn't reveal much of substance. My impression was that a lot was more about impressing people with shiny things (look what this cool tool can do) rather than presenting interesting ideas. I had to leave after the first day, because I couldn't afford taking unpaid leave from my job.

Here are some links to what people said about my presentation:

• .NET langauges Blog
• DevHawk Blog
• Lycangeek Blog

I liked that Wesner Moise called me well-known. This may seem small, but for someone trying to get traction for their ideas, and to be taken seriously, it is a big deal. I guess it is all a matter of perception.

Finally here is a picture of me presenting, but don't let the long-hair confuse you: I was shorn two days ago.

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About the Blogger

Christopher Diggins is a software developer and freelance writer. Christopher loves programming, but is eternally frustrated by the shortcomings of modern programming languages. As would any reasonable person in his shoes, he decided to quit his day job to write his own ( www.heron-language.com ). Christopher is the co-author of the C++ Cookbook from O'Reilly. Christopher can be reached through his home page at www.cdiggins.com.