Day 2 on Teched 2003 - Israel

Day 2 at TechEd Israel 2003

 

Last might someone from Microsoft asked my boss to speak for15 min. about migration to visual studio 2003

So we worked on it all afternoon yesterday.

I waked my boss at 8:00 am; he was supposed to speak at: 9:45. We ate breakfast and ran to the hotel where the presentation was taking place. We talked to the main speaker (ronen smoocha which is a great guy) and decided that I will go on stage.

And I had another presentation (my big first one at TechEd), so I thought about it and decided that it will calm me down just like the party a week before I got married.

I live in Israel and it is very common that we have a big party a week before we marry; we wore all sorts of traditional costumes and have lots of food. We had 200 people at the party, and I remember that it drained all the tension towards the BIG day.

So at 9:45 am the presentation began 20 min. later he called me up and gave me a microphone…… now that was wrong, I can't speak without my hands. At the office they always say that if someone was to tie my hands I wouldn't be able to say anything. They were right, I couldn't move nor could I express myself as I wanted. So I spoke for 15 min and that was it.

When I'm speaking to an audience I can feel that the message passed thru, I wasn't disappointed at all although I knew it could be better, surprisingly I was more eager to make my presentation, I was full of energies although I haven't eaten or slept for the last 2 days.

I checked the room where I was supposed to speak and noticed there where only about 100 seats. A day before MS mailed me that 150 people registered with my presentation; I managed to move it to another room where I spoke earlier).

At 13:30, I had half an hour to make sure everything worked, they gave me a small wireless mic that attached to my shirt, and we checked the sound and the screen. Everything was perfect.

People were coming in, my wife was there, we're about to celebrate a year to our marriage tomorrow. Slowly the room was filled, it was 14:07 and people were still coming. I had to start it … I had only and hour and 15 min and it started 7 min ago.

After 10 min. there were almost 300 people, they had to add 2 rows of chairs because there wasn't enough.

It was a blast, I talked about the importance of pdb in production environments and about 5 code demos including dumping a process and analyzing it using vs.2003 debugger extension sos. You can read more about it here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/DBGch03.asp

 

I demonstrated what the debugger really knows about the source file and that is only the file name, I wrote a little sample:

public void Doit()

{

for (int j = 0 ;j < 10 ; j ++)

      {

            Console.WriteLine(j);

      }

}

And then debugged it using the following text:

public void Doit()

{

      for (init j to be zero ; while j smaller than 10 ; increment j)

      {

            print out j

      }

}

 

Just because both sources had the same filename VS.net couldn't know it wasn't the original, so I debugged the text as if it was the source code.

 

Something had to be wrong at the presentation, when I came to show how you debug MSIL, ildasm just refused to generate the source files.

I used:

Ildasm /source myexe.exe /out:source.il

Ildasm /source myexe.exe /out=source.il

Ildasm /source /out:source.il myexe.exe

Ildasm /source /out=source.il myexe.exe

 

Nothing worked it was dumping the entire source at the console.

Although I've done it lots of times before, after the presentation ended I couldn't figure out was wrong. It works great now. Anyway I learned to make screen images of all the demos I make in case something is wrong.

 

I got lots of good feedbacks from people who were listening and I got invited to "Ask the expert's session" today……

Anyway we drank a lot of beer at the session, answered some questions about .net architecture, exception and debugging. It was very productive.

 

Later on we had a party, and there we (me my boss and nimrod luria) drank some more, I don't remember how many tequilas I drank , something about 5 and 3 bottles of beer… oh my god, how I was drunk.

At some point I remember seeking for the CEO of Microsoft Israel; I wanted to thank him for the great party… I didn’t find him (good for me).

 

And that was it.