How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Susan Ibach — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:13:36 GMT

Glen - Forgive the slow reply, you bring up an interesting issue and I wanted to do a bit of research before I answered. I am hesitant to use real world data in my demonstrations becaues of the risk of exposing confidential or private information. You can certainly use publicly available information in your demos. But anything you purchase is not considered public so that would imply you shouldn't be using the Azure marketplace data. As alternatives check out the Contoso BI Demo data set in the microsoft download center, or the Mondial dataset at sqlskills.com, or check out Statistics Canada, you can download lots of interesting data sets from their site. Australias government site has some fun data as well "Frogs of South Australia" anyone?

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Susan Ibach — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:03:58 GMT

Jeff - :)

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Susan Ibach — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:03:45 GMT

Atley - agreed real world vs simple cannot be a straight yes no answer. It is important that your demos be simple enough for people to follow. If they are keeping up then it cna be beneficial to delve deeper into real world scenarios

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Glen Martin — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 04:44:03 GMT

Some really good formatting tips, but what about real code/date Knowing a bit about how you teach, what's your feeling on bringing real world data/code into class? I'm strongly looking at bringing Azure Datamarket data into SQL/SSAS/PowerPivot classes...

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Jeff — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:35:23 GMT

Clean your fingernails! That is the best tip ever...

re: How to Make Your Code Demos Rock!

Atley — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:06:45 GMT

I think the question of whether code demonstrations should be simple or real world cannot be answered in a cut and dried 'this is how it should always be' way.

The answer depends on your audience, the subject at hand, the time you have to make your point and the perspective of your target audience.

In many cases, such as at TechDays, where you have a short time to get several points across, simplicity can be your friend, whereas, in a classroom / hackfest / user group meeting where you have a longer time to focus on a single or a couple of points, you can easily delve a little deeper.

Mind you, even in these situations it can be good to start the demonstration off with a simple example and then delve deeper if it looks like your audience is indeed interested and wants a more "real-world" point of view on the subject.