I’ve posted before about the fact that Reporting and Installation Packages are forgotten arts. Dan Jurden’s talk this morning is about the latter.

Good presentations are tough to do. People in the audience that think they know more than the presenter, and say so during the presentation, don’t make it any easier. For me, as an attendee, nothing makes a session worse than some person in the crowd who insists on telling the presenter how to do their demo. The only thing I can say to those people, including the two in this session, is that they should put their name in to do a presentation if they know so much. Until they do that, just sit back and listen. If you have a question ask it, but don’t sit there and tell the presenter how to do their job. I don’t come to you office and tell you how to do yours.

Back to the presentation. Dan opened his presentation by stating that he was having hardware issues. This is cool. I can understand. The thing that sucks is when his demo goes south because what he is trying to do is not working.

I can’t imagine the stress of sitting at the front of a room, seeing that only about a dozen people wanted to see your talk, having the demo fail and then having people walk out of your demo. I’m sure it doesn’t make troubleshooting your demo any easier.

Nice recovery with the help of one of the attendees.

One of the interesting features is the simple Serial Number validation that is offered. Certainly not a fool proof way to do your licensing, but it does do more than nothing.

Custom actions (.NET assembles inheriting a base install class) are a good way to create your own Serial Number entry screen validation, or custom page layouts.

Overall an average talk due to the techncal issues. Very much the 200 level talk that the agenda says it is.