UGSS (Microsoft's User Group Support Services) have just published a video series that I recorded last year on How To Give Great Presentations. This free series of 8 videos covers the following subjects:-

1. Introduction (6 minutes 23 seconds)
2. Choosing The Right Presentation (8 minutes 30 seconds)
3. How To Explain Absolutely Anything (8 minutes 51 seconds)
4. Planning Your Presentation (22 minutes 52 seconds)
5. Nervousness And How To Overcome It (13 minutes 7 seconds)
6. How To Give Great Demos (26 minutes 9 seconds)
7. Preparing Your Laptop (19 minutes 21 seconds)
8. Presenting Your Presentation (35 minutes 39 seconds)

If you're new to presenting and feel that the leap is a bit daunting this video series will help you. It is aimed at first timers but experienced presenters will also find tips and tricks to help hone existing presentation skills. The series is also accompanied by a paper that you can download at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/HowToGiveGreatPresentations.pdf.

On Saturday at Modern .NET I gave my second micro-presentation. This time it was on Twitter. Micro-presentations are also called Pecha Kucha (Japanese for "chit-chat") and 20/20 so called because these presentations are always 20 slides where each slide is 20 seconds (because PowerPoint is set to auto-advance after 20 seconds). I recorded a sound track for the micro-presentation and recorded the slides and have put together a video (6 minutes 52 seconds) that you can download here. Phil Winstanley has a real video filmed on a camcorder that you can watch here (the first 10 seconds or so are missing but there's a better atmosphere).

Thanks to everyone who attended and endured my particular stance on this. Also thanks to @Plip for being such a good sport. And thanks to Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and all of the speakers for a great day.

One final thought to leave you with: DDD 9 is on Saturday 29th January 2011. They will probably be looking for micro-presentations there as well. Give it a go - it's loads of pain and stress fun.

A few years ago I wrote a paper on "How To Give Great Presentations". Most of the information in this document is relatively timeless and so it needs little updating. I have uploaded an updated copy now which contains a few updates for more recent technologies referenced in the document as well as a few additional sections. The majority of the document is unchanged (it increased from 25 pages to 28 pages) but if you use it as a reference then you should download the updated copy.

Andy Westgarth has started a new user group for Microsoft technologies in the North East of England called North East Bytes (http://www.nebytes.net/). Like all of the best user groups it is free to join and free to attend (seems to be a growing trend). NEBytes had their inaugural meeting on Wednesday 20th January 2010. Congratulations, Andy, I wish you, the team and the NEBytes community every success.

I'm a long time fan of Fiddler, an excellent tool for spying on and interfering with HTTP requests. Analyzing the headers and packets sent across the wire has been an invaluable source of information to me many times. Sadly Fiddler suffers from a drawback where it is unable to view localhost traffic by default. There are workarounds but these are not always practical. So recently I was interested to see HttpWatch.

HttpWatch integrates straight into Internet Explorer or FireFox and provides an analysis of browser traffic. In particular because it is simply using the browser it clearly sees all localhost traffic without any workarounds. Now, whether HttpWatch has more features and functionality than Fiddler is still open for debate but in this one issue at least HttpWatch is solving a problem for me. The "Basic" version of HttpWatch is free and the other versions you have to pay for (whereas there is only one version of Fiddler and it does everything and it is all free).

It is always a happy day for me when a new version of one of my favourite tools is released. ZoomIt 4, the presenter's best friend, was released in August. The main new feature is LiveZoom. To be honest LiveZoom (by default available from Ctrl+4) is the way I thought the regular Ctrl+1 zoom facility should have worked from the beginning: it allows you to zoom in on something on your screen but leaves the computer still functioning so you can click and type and generally use the computer whilst still zoomed. Perfect. The caveat is that the LiveZoom feature only works on Windows Vista and higher but this is not a problem for most presenters.

Last week I attended the Localization Research Centre's 14th annual conference in Limerick, Ireland. My role there was to present a poster session. This is a new format for me so I thought I'd take a moment to explain it. The idea is that you create a poster (A0 size in this case) about your chosen subject and the organisers print this out and hang it in an area with many other posters. At a given time (lunch time in this case) you stand next to your poster and answer questions about it to anyone who takes an interest. Here's a composite of 3 photos before anyone started (the composite was created by Microsoft's Image Composite Editor):-

Here is my "Internationalizing Silverlight" poster (complete with pasting error) together with another very interesting poster on English To Chinese Translation):-

I found it a really interesting idea and I think it would work at events in our industry. In some ways it is like the sadly unsuccessful Ask The Experts that was tried a few times at DDD in Reading. In the Ask The Experts format lots of experts hang around waiting for people to come up and ask them any question at all. It seemed like a good idea but it never worked which was a shame and at the time we couldn't see how to fix it. The poster sessions appear to solve the Ask The Experts problem by having a physical focus, a clear subject matter area and a ready made set of discussion points. We might try this out at DDD South West 2.

Brave UK Community Leaders, Tim Leung, Dave McMahon, Gavin Osborn and Steve Smith have been foolish enough to take up the Microsoft UK Challenge this June for 3.5 days in Wales doing running, cycling, kayaking, problem solving and using strategy skills (I think Dave's going to sit that last part out). To learn more read what Gavin has to say here.

There's a new .NET podcast on the scene. It's called Sod This and it is the quintessential "two blokes and a microphone" podcast straight from Gary's Garage (actually it might have been Oliver's Garage but there's no alliteration in that). Gary Short and Oliver Sturm, the nomadic DevExpress Scottish and German tech evangelists, provide a series of podcasts involving swearing, interviews, abuse, straight talking, Silverlight bashing and a bit more swearing.

Craig Murphy and Andy Westgarth interviewed me at the "Heroes Happen Here" Visual Studio 2008 Launch last March and Craig posted the podcast on his site here as part of his Twelve Podcasts Of Christmas. It's about 15 minutes and I talk about Visual Studio 2008, extension methods, internationalization, community and The .NET Developer Network.