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.