I received the feedback list for my DDD 5 sessions yesterday. Let me summarize, with comments:
Session 1 with Ian, Bluffers’ Guide to C# 3.0 - most people thought it was great. The only criticism that touched this session was more about the combination with the second one, see below.
Session 2 with Ian, 10 cool things to do with C# 3.0 - most people thought this was great, too. Some said it was a little too much content for an hour, others said they enjoyed the longest demos most while the shortest were hard to follow. So either we should have gone for, say, 6 cool things instead of 10, or the demos should have clearer somehow. Of course the background of people wasn’t the same either… in the end, it has to be said that the session didn’t have the goal of actually explaining everything we showed in so much detail that every attendee would have been able to reproduce it him- or herself. It was to be a compromise — some things that people would grasp immediately, others which would just provide food for thought. It was also clear that, depending on prior experience, the line between “what I grasp immediately” and “what looks great, but I really don’t understand at all” would be moving. In the end I think the comments show that we reached that goal for the second session.
For the combination of sessions 1 and 2 there were some comments that basically dealt with the format. It was said, for instance, that the combined description of the sessions was confusing because it sounded like we would do two hours of the same, while it was really one hour’s worth of introductory material and a second hour of advanced nuggets. On the other hand somebody said that he was surprised to find that the second hour more or less required the basic knowledge of the first. I guess this just shows us that session descriptions are in fact important, and that maybe the agenda system for DDD could be a bit clearer. We’ll be sure to take all feedback on board of course, and try to do things better next time.
Finally, Session 3, the .NET Game Challenge. Feedback on this was very mixed, although positive overall. Many comments picked up on things that I realized myself during and after the session. If you were there, you know that I did this session before, and I’m sure I can say that it went better the first time round. The main reason for that was that the session was tightly packed with content, and on a very tight schedule. With the (much!) larger and very interactive audience at DDD, it turned out to be impossible to keep everything on track. As a result, I had to use more copy&paste than I would have liked, and I can totally understand the comments which said that things seemed a bit rushed. I can only offer my apologies to those of you who didn’t like the session for these reasons - at least, according to the comments, the large majority still found the content very useful. So thanks for coming, and I’ll make sure to keep the specifics of the DDD audience in mind next time!