Hi,

So last week I finally completed my Europe/Middle East tour as part of the Microsoft ReMIX event. If any of you attended please send me your feedback, good and bad, as I'm always trying to improve my presentation style.

I'll be honest by the end of the tour I was a little fed-up of presenting, I have pretty much been presenting none stop since February, and most of the presentations were similar content. I'd really wanted to produce some new stuff but I really didn't have the time and the old stuff was what was being requested. I'm planning on producing some new WPF and Silverlight demos by November when I'm sure I will be out presenting again.

It's really difficult to create an interesting presentation, it might sound simple, pick a topic and talk about it. However there are so many other pieces to the puzzle, for example the location. As the presenter I have no control over the location, however this makes such a big difference, I recently attended a presentation delivered in a room without floor to ceiling walls. The presenters did a great job but it was very difficult to hear them as all the outside noise came flooding into the room.

The time of your presentation is another, I think the best slot is probably just after the keynote when the coffee has kicked in and people are waking up. I always seem to get the post lunch slot which has to be one of the worst, everyone is so sleepy it's really difficult to get some energy back in the room.

The next issue is how do you present your topic? For example I tried both live demos, building simple interactions in Blend on the fly, and Customer demos, showing more complex work I had previously produced for a variety of clients. I definitely receive more feedback from the later, however did this really give the audience what they want?

My plan for my next presentation is to demo one of my customer projects and produce a document to accompany the demo i.e. a step-by-step guide on how to build what you have just seen. I will ask the developer on the project to produce a similar doc so I have content for both the devs and designers. This will be a lot of extra work but I think/hope answer a lot of questions for the audience.

Any ideas please let me know.