It seemed like a good idea…
What a week! I had a lot of customer activities/engagements this past week. I had to travel out east and present on a series of topics (and carry my
shuttle with me) the first part of the week. I had the
financial services architect forum back in Toronto and then I had committed to the "cool demo" at the company meeting.
Every quarter we have a company meeting and as is often the case there is a demo on something new or fun. We wanted to do something a little different and Thursday afternoon we decided that we would show Vista - presented in a dueling banjo's format - where I (Dev Evangelist) duel with
Bruce Cowper (IT Pro Evangelist).
The IT Pro demos were already set and so I had to figure out my demos. The first would be a cool WPF browser demo that goes against our AD/SAP environment and demonstrates a 3D like viewer of our AD hierarchy. The second we would go further and demonstrate a custom plug-in for Vista Media Center edition that would provide integration with a Digital Media Receiver (DMR) - specifically the Roku SoundBridge M1000.
I had already written a plug-in to do something similar for Windows Media Center 2005 so I figured it shouldn't be so hard to recompile for .Net 2.0 and register it in Vista Media Center. Indeed, this was the easy part, and while I experienced some problems it eventually all worked in the Dev Environment. I was set - so I thought!
The next day we're setting up the demo in our lab area before we set it up in the main presentation theatre and guess what - more problems! With the help of our University of Waterloo Co-op Lucas (who has the coolest side burns I've ever seen) we work on it and it turns out to be flaky. We make some code changes that appear to make the code more reliable. Time to move to the presentation theatre.
We setup out test network in the presentation theatre, connect everything and it doesn't work! We troubleshoot, make more code changes, recompile, re-register the plug-in - we do this a number of times and cannot get it to stabilize! The Roku hangs at times, at times it works and we just can't seem to make it predictable. By this time it's 2:15 and the company meeting is set to start in 15 minutes and I'm short one demo!
I hack the code furiously while Lucas moves the code over to another machine and turns it into a console app so that should anything (bad) happen we've got a backup. That's it, time to start! Bruce and I are both doing two demos with Bruce up first, then me, back to Bruce and then I close out with my Media Center demo.
Yikes, the backup laptop has gone to sleep and terminated our backup connection to the Roku device and (the Roku device is facing the audience) this has hung the device. The guys on the team see it, they have to reset the Roku device - I'm in trouble here - I'll let you guess how it ended! Good news is the audience didn't notice - what a ride!
