The Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild meeting went well. I discovered that the demonstrations run too long for a Code Camp, so I will need to shorten it for next weekend's SoCal Code Camp. Justin James offered a great tip: put all the code into a prewritten application. This will definitely speed things up, but I think there are a couple of mollifiable drawbacks.

The first draw back is that some of the samples can't compile. This is either because I am demonstrating what can't be done (assign a List<string> to a List<object>). I can either put them in a project that I don't expect to compile and not compile the solution, or I can place them in code snippets.

The second draw back is I feel that it's easy to lose the audience when the code is already there. The temptation is to run through it with the expectation that the audience will understand it; after all, they're coders too. Of course, coders are human (sometimes). One way to handle that is to slow the pace down to a speed that's quicker than typing the code but still gets the point clearly across. Another way to handle it is to create a project for each little piece so that they're in digestible chunks. One reason prebuilt code is hard to understand at demonstration time is due to the irrelevant code surrounding where the focus should be.

The person in Florence who suggested I explain the difference between var and dynamic had a good point. I never considered understanding that an issue, but it makes sense if someone isn't familiar with C# 3.0. They assume var means variant, which is far from the truth.