RE: User group meeting last night in Dallas

Sorry your group had a bad experience, Booth.  I've been doing a similar
presentation around the country, and I've been having no problems.  I
create an entire application right on my laptop, and for the grand
finale I even connect to RPG business logic on my iSeries in Chicago
using my CELL PHONE!  It's slow, sure, but pretty darned impressive.
(And it's a LOT faster if I can get a VPN connection, but typically
firewalls prevent that, although hotels often work.)

The point is that WDSC should never "fail".  I've done this for at least
five different user groups already, with more presentations lined up,
and I have yet to have a meltdown.  The teacher may have been prepared,
but my guess is he never ran it on his new machine.  When I run the
presentation, I make it clear just how simple this stuff is.  RPG
programmers tend to walk away going, "Yeah, I can do THAT!"

As to connectivity issues, one of the big parts of properly showing WDSC
is to show that all of your web development can be done without even
touching the iSeries, and that's something I emphasize.  Experienced
WDSC presenters also know that you can have multiple workspaces from
which you can restart in case some unforeseen circumstance makes one
part of your presentation unworkable.

All in all, I'd say the problem was simply one of preparation.  This is
not a knock on the presenter at all; WDSC is a huge product and it's
difficult for anyone to present it in a short period.  It's best done in
an all-day workshop.  And it helps to have actually written a book on
the subject <grin>.

Joe

P.S. I'm doing a workshop like this in Chicago in September in
conjunction with Anne Lucas and Team GGI.

http://time.teamggi.com/events/050914a.asp



> From: Booth Martin
> 
> User group meeting last night in Dallas was interesting but
distressing to
> an IBM bigot such as myself.  The presentation was   eServer Studio
> Development (IDE) IBM WebSphere  versus  Microsoft VisualStudio.Net
and
> was
> billed as being as " An unbiased live demonstration of both these
products
> will be presented and will be processed on an IBM eServer i5."
> 
> It was the best attended meeting of the year, by far.  Nearly
everything
> went well and we all learned a great deal and it was a positive
> experience.
> 
> However, Wepsphere failed.  We could see exciting pieces of it, but it
is
> just too complicated to use apparently.  I came away shaking my head
and
> wondering why it has to be so complicated and over-engineered, or
> something.
>  Once the first piece of the project failed, the speaker's attempts to
> recover the demonstration just led to a cascading of problems, and
finally
> all communication with the iSeries was lost.
> 
> I have to admit that VisualStudio looked simplistic to the eye, but
gosh,
> it
> worked.