Dallas TechFest 2010
30 Jul 2010 at University of Texas Dallas - Engineering and Computer Science South

I was expecting this talk to be a talk about the theory of MVVM and got a practical example of using MVVM in a windows phone application. In addition, it was a great example of using Blend and Studio in the same project to allow designers to build views and developers to build models and viewmodels. Good presentation.

Entertaining, for sure and I like the style of presentation. My company not very mature int the development area, and we're pretty small (85 employees, 4 IT persons....that handle all of IT, including telecom...that includes myself, the diretor.) So, many of the sessions, either attempted to be practical (and provided solutions way outside our scope) or were way too high level (I'm the only expert developer of the bunch, and I'm self-taught and probably violate 50% of the guidelines that Caleb covered...and that ain't gonna change anytime soon. :) I felt like his content was good, but I'd like to either see this in a workshop format, or in multiple sessions where he could spend more time on each area, rather than being rushed.

Oh, and I know he said not to, but I just have to say this, I love to see a good sparring match from time to time, if we can all shake hands and be friends afterward. :) In the end, as Chandler said, it's between them and none of my business.

The presentation was well organized and John stayed on topic with clear answers. That coupled with some amazing information got the day going well.

Good talk Kevin. Well presented and good coverage on different areas. I really liked that you didn't present it as "this is the only way." "

I thought the presentation went very well. It wasn't quite what I expected from the description and ended up being about more general strategies for how organize and store your data. In the long run, that will be more useful for future projects than the specific nuts and bolts of data access from MVC I was expecting.

I strongly disagree with the commentor saying that this was the worst presentation. The speaker clearly knew the material and had a rough outline which he allowed to move through the topic as dictated by the requests of the audiance. This allowed for a very dynamic presentation. I just got the impression that there were a half-dozen more topics he wanted to cover and we ran out of time.

I hate anonymous comments, and didn't mean to make one:

I too was mislead by the subject. I was thinking more of API's in general, based on the agenda.

Still, the material was well presented.

Is mine...now for the third time (someone might want code to prevent double clicking the comment button.)

Agreed with anonymous 2 about transmitting to the audience. Wish to make it more interactive next time. However, there are mixed reactions to the talk. I have 23 emails with very good compliments and here is my email for the critics [email protected]. If your suggestions are really to help feel free to email. Please try to register for joindin account and leave comments. This anonymous game does not let us know if it is the same person over and over again. I shall be happy to give some good giveaways for your comments, too.

Thanks Dan and anonymous. I already regretted what I did and apologized to Caleb the next day. your suggestions definitely help. it's true being right is not an excuse for being rude. Caleb and I talked about it and he has blogged about it too. http://developingux.com/blog/2010/08/02/learning-in-public-and-being-heckled-at-the-dallas-tech-fest/ I am glad that he accepted my suggestion on Liskov and at the same time agree that it wasn't a big part of his talk. My intention was good and I didnt want anyone to take the wrong message about Liskov as Caleb has a huge fan following.

Agreed with anonymous about transmitting to the audience. Wish to make it more interactive next time. However, there are mixed reactions to the talk. I have 23 emails with very good compliments and here is my email for the critics [email protected]. If your suggestions are really to help feel free to email. I shall be happy to give some good giveaways for your comments, too.

This was a great talk and learned a lot from it. I know this one is pretty tough since a lot of people fight the non-relational data model and agree that it did get a little off topic at times, but I have seen this happen in a few Azure talks. However the speaker stayed after the session to answer my questions that I had and left me a happy attendee.