Performance Tools demo filmed for Channel 9

On Tuesday of this week I got a chance to demo our performance tools for Microsoft’s Channel Nine community web site. One of the community team members liked my blog postings (Part one, Part two and Part three are all up now), and contacted me about doing the demo. I was glad to say yes, as I generally enjoy the community work, and I don’t have any problems with interviews. So on the day of the demo, I was chilling in my office working on some bugs and looking around for a demo application to test out our tools on, and I was feeling pretty good about the amount of time I had to get my demo together (the demo was at 4 in the afternoon). Then my boss came in and was, shall we say, *surprised* that I didn’t have the demo application and script ready yet. I guess that low-stress attitude that I have isn’t always the best thing…although it does help keep the blood pressure low.

 

            But regardless of the doubts, I was able to find a good application to use and I had plenty of time to prepare and practice my script. However, I totally agree with my boss that I should have gotten the demo application earlier; I was fairly lucky that the second app that I tried turned into a good sample. I was also happy that I was able to quickly use our tools to find a performance issue in the sample application. I didn’t even have to “seed” it with a fake performance issue to find. That is one of the best things about using our profiler; it makes it much easier to find performance issue in code bases that you are not familiar with.

 

Doing the actual demo seemed to go pretty well, as I usually don’t get too nervous in front of cameras. My only real issue is if my WPM gets too high, as cameras seem to make me talk faster then normal. After the demo, there was a small interview portion, where I got a chance to talk a bit about my team and about my work experience. Soon I’ll get to take a look at the demo, and if my team (and MS legal) gives it the ok, then it will be posted on Channel Nine in a week or so. I’ll be sure to post a link to it when it goes up.

 

            By the start of next week I intend to have another post in my series of reviews of data-displaying web sites. My first review in that series covered the Social Security Administration’s index of popular baby names. Interestingly, you can also find that review by googling “large amount of useless data,” and by looking at result number three on that list. Hopefully that reflects on the topic of that article and not on my blog in general!