Putting a good technical talk together takes a decent amount of work. You need to make sure your talk tells a story from end-to-end, you need to give folks enough context (without spending the whole talk in PowerPoint), and you need clear concise demos that folks can follow.

You also have to make sure your demos are repeatable… there is nothing worse than watching a presenter crash and burn because their demos failed (actually the one thing worse is being that presenter). Most demo failures are not a result of “the demo gods” and can be avoided by working out exactly what you’re going to demo and practicing it a few times.

This all becomes especially important if (like me) you aren’t a natural presenter and you need good content and interesting demos to compensate for your awkward speech patterns .

Back in my pre-Microsoft days I ran the Hobart .NET User Group for a period of time and I know it was always a struggle to find speakers to come and present on the latest technology (there aren’t a huge number of bleeding edge techies in Tasmania). I would often spend time putting together talks myself. I’m sure other folks are in this position too – or they have other platforms where they could talk about new technologies – but lack the time or expertise to put together a talk.

 

Grab the Talk-in-a-Box

So, I’ve taken the deck & demos I put together for my EF6 talk at TechEd 2013 and made them available for others to use. Everything you need is available in my Demo-EF6Simple a GitHub repo. The repo includes slide deck, demo script, code snippets, completed source code, etc. Check out the README file for specific details. You are of course free to use the content as-is or modify it to your hearts content.

If folks find this useful then I’ll continue to do this with other talks that I prepare – so let me know if you use the content at all. I have a level 300-400 session that I recently did on EF6.1 and EF6, so I’ll work on making that available to give you a more in-depth option as well.