Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Final Post and I'm off to bed.  I appreciate the CLEAR effort put into PDC by, I assume, the organizers, to ensure large fonts.  I've mentioned before this in the Tips on Giving a Great Microsoft Presentation.

Here's my PDC Presentation Scorecard:

• +1 for using Lucida Console 14pt or higher for Code.
• -1 for not using it with Command Prompts.  (Hint: Use the SAME Font and SAME size in all apps when presenting.  It's less jarring.  That includes Notepad, VS.NET and CMD.EXE)
• -1 for not running DevEnv /fs 18.  It's great the the code was easy to see, but everything else wasn't.
• -1 for not seeing ANYONE use ZoomIn.  Get to know how to use this tool.  Never a Presentation goes by where someone doesn't thank me for using it. Of course, practice it first, or you'll make your audience car-sick. Seriously.
• +1 for intonation.  Everyone has clearly gone through speaker training with Richard Klees.  Awesome.
• +1 for personality.  There were some Koolaid Drones, but folks like Doug Purdy expressed such obvious passion and fun for their jobs that I can honestly say the majority of the sessions were great.
• -2 for food.  As Rory said to me, “the food here is ass.“  Walking by the “screw you diabetic“ buffets at Universal was even worse than the “Hey blood sugar boy“ free Haagen Days. Fortunately my kidneys didn't shut down this conference.  Of course, this has nothing to do with Presentations, I just wanted to get it in there.
• +1 for effort.  You could see the excitement as folks got to talk about stuff they'd kept secret for three years.
• +1 for preparedness.  I didn't see any many demo gaffs, and watching Don Box and Chris Anderson together with Jim Alchin made it obvious that these presentations were practiced dozens of times all over campus to different groups.