I was quite nervous when I
started my talk and it showed. Most of the feedback
for my talk contained one or more of the following
sentiments- The speaker seemed
knowledgeable about the topic.
- The speaker was nervous
while talking.
- The speaker should have
provided more samples especially since his talk
ended 30 minutes early.
The last was especially damning and was shared by
most of the attendees that bothered to post
comments. This was entirely my fault. I assumed the
crowd would be familiar with XSD and the
terminology around it without considering the fact
that without examples statements like
"xs:key/xs:keyref is preferable to using
xs:ID/xs:IDREF because the former can provide
scoped identity constraints while the latter do
not" are hard to follow.
The only sample/demo I showed was how to actually
work around an issue that has bothered me about
ASP.NET Web Services for a while. I showed how to
use a custom
SoapExtension to perform
Schema validation of incoming SOAP Messages
according to the schema defined in the WSDL types
section. This gets around that by default an
ASP.NET web method does not ensure that an incoming
SOAP message actually conforms to the schema
described in the WSDL, instead it just checks to
see if the SOAP message "kinda looks like it
conforms to the schema". This is due to limitations
in the XmlSerializer some of which I described in
my article on
XML Serialization in the .NET Framework.
I need to talk to the TechEd folks to see if I can
post my slides and code online. If I can't it
probably isn't a great loss, the schema guidelines
are based on the ones in my
W3C XML Schema Design Patterns: Avoiding
Complexity piece while the stuff on custom
SoapExtension objects that perform validation
should show up in an upcoming
MSDN
Magazine article by Aaron Skonnard.
The good thing about the negative reaction to my
talk is that the worst has happened. I gave a talk,
it sucked, now I no longer feel nervous about
giving a talk. At least it can't suck as much as my
TechEd talk did. :)
With any luck I should get another talk at speaking
during
PDC