The last IVBUG meeting was about the subject of caching and the Caching Application Block, and was hosted by non other than our very own Software Simplist, Udi Dahan. Here's the presentation.

Udi is a very eloquent speaker and you can tell he has some very large amounts of knowledge in his head. The presentation started out very nicely with Udi showing a simple implementation of a slow database layer and talking about the problems and solutions one would use in designing a data layer access object (facade) in a service oriented manner. Very interesting. The whole lecture was much more about ideas of good design and when to use and not to use the caching application block.

There were some technical problems, however, that prevented the meeting from being perfect. All of these are things to watch out for and this listing is in no way meant to degrade the quality of the presentation, merely to serve as a reminder for myself not to repeat the same mistakes, but instead to come up with my own brand new mistakes in my lectures :)

• Udi did the talk while coding in a language he was not fully acquainted with. This caused some Minor setbacks in initial coding but overall did not hurt the overall speed of the coding session. However it does “look badly“ a bit when a speaker does not come prepared. Use the code you are most comfortable with.
• It would be better to actually code the whole exercise before the lecture in VB.Net (Udi is mainly a C# dude). In fact, some of the code would have been better prepared in advance with removing comments taking place while the session advances. Saves you the trouble of fighting with the code too much. Have the tricky parts ready in advance.
• Udi was using a laptop that was not his own and consequently, was using a guest account on that system. This led to some pretty funky security exceptions during a small part of the presentation (trying to build the application block, trying to use the application block) since you needed administrator right and some read\write rights on some folders. Definitely something to look out for. Do the whole session at least once on the same machine that will be used for the presentation.
• Although there was a good coding session at the beginning, we only got to the main part of actually how to use the Caching application block about 15 mins. before the end. By that time most people were pretty tired and some were starting to go home. That's too bad because I thought that was one of the most important points of this presentation. Make your point early enough in the presentation.

Hopefully I did not offend anyone and this would be a great learning experience. I am in no way an experienced presentation guy and would argue that being in the same situation I would probably have done very poorly compared to Udi, which is, again, one of the most knowledgeable people I know in some of these areas.

OK. Now I expect to be grilled just as much in my own presentations, seeing as  I am so easily judging others. Feel free.Bring it on. I should take them as easily as I dish them out.