WEB404 post-mortem

My talk on web services internals like custom reflectors and importers and format extensions went well -- for what I wanted to achieve. However, based on the audience feedback there was definitively a spread between good and bad in terms of customer experience and most of the critical comments are related to the demo (of course). Here's two out of about 40 feedback comments I got :

• The speaker had quite a few surprises with his own code during the demo, giving the impression that what he proposed was rather a problem than a solution. The techniques shown looked very powerful, though.

• sorry about all the demo problems, I hope practicing the demos 3times more before the next time will help.

What's interesting about these two is that everything actually worked and failed just as expected. I was running into "problems" that were there by intent in order to introduce the next step to get the solution going. Whenever I do a coding session (and I think it was appropriate to do that for this session) it is not even my intent to make it all look as if the sun would always shine and everything were easy and works with two mouse clicks. It's not. It's work. Also, I needed good reasons to go into the debugger and show appropriate debugging techniques -- essential for writing importers. But it's always pretty difficult to make it right for everybody, especially with level 400 talks on very complex matters where you need to cover a lot of ground.

Here's the link to the Soap Extension Wizard once more.