When Murphy kicks in on presentation

I had my worst presentation so far today. While Matjaž delivered his usual good talk I created a mess but it wasn’t my fault. At least not a huge part of it. The plan was to show how a get-process cmdlet is quickly and easily built with Visual Studio 2005 and to show a simple SqlServerDBProvider in action.

To save time I fired up Visual Studio 2005 before presentation (it talks quite some seconds on my laptop), opened “Add Reference…” message box (it takes time to enumerate all assemblies if they aren’t in cache), closed dialog and waited for my turn. After Matjaž introduced Power Shell I started creating get-proc cmdlet. I created a new class library process and renamed default Class1 class to GetProcCmdlet. So far so good. Next I typed : and a letter C (inheriting from Cmdlet class). Here the disaster struck. Visual Studio 2005 has frozen for some reason. To make it worse I was unable to kill it. To make it worse the second Visual Studio 2005 instance has frozen at same point, too. To make it worse I was unable to kill this instance, too. To make it worse I had to restart (hardware reset) Windows XP SP2. To make it worse it takes quite a lot time for Windows XP SP2 to boot up after so cruel restart. And when I finally managed to start up Visual Studio 2005 again I lost a couple of minutes in Add References… dialog. After this the demo went smoothly until the time for second demo came. Brutal restart affected the other demo somehow, too. And I lost again quite a lot time repairing and restarting second demo. At least Matjaž had some fun and an opportunity to poke jokes on developers.

Oh well, an experience to learn from.