Horrible MSDN Webcast

I attended an online MSDN webcast today titled "Advanced reporting using SQL Reporting Services 2005". I have worked with SQL RS 2000 and with my own share of whines and grunts, I still like the product. I have not taken a look at the Yukon version yet and was hoping to see more new features in it.

This presentation was a total dud ! The guy who presented it either did not have much time to prepare for this presentation or was feeling totally bored doing this. He had just two things on his agenda - URL access and the RS SOAP web service. Both these features are already available in SQL RS 2000 and so, there was nothing new that was presented.

The one code demonstration that he did was bad. I am usually not this critical but when I see a presentation done badly, my blood boils over. There are a few hundred people waiting online to learn something new and here the guy just blows the whole thing over. The demonstration had a few text boxes and list boxes horribly strewn around with no proper labels attached. The user is left to use his intelligence to figure out what the application is supposed to do. Not only does this guy need to go to a presentation skills class but also take up a course on information architecture !

He was done with this whole presentation within 25 minutes including a break for answering questions. So, I posted him a question asking him to talk about some new features of SQL RS 2005 since both the items in his agenda were already features in the existing product. He casually answered my question by saying that he does not have the time to cover the new features. He said this when he had another 25 minutes on the clock to go. The whole presentation was supposed to go for an hour. I believe some of the other people complained about him wrapping up earlier too. I just requested the MSDN team in the survey, not to bring this guy again for any other presentations. I, personally, think that he did not know much about the new features and hence, avoided my question like that.

Whew ! This blogging is good.....lets me take out all the passive aggressiveness and express myself properly. Later !