Being Mike Benkovich
I suppose that if I were a puppeteer and I found a magic portal that literally allowed me to be in mind of another, popping into Mike's brain for a day would make an interesting stop. Especially last Thursday, when he came to Omaha to do an MSDN event. You see, Mike is the Developer Community Champion for the Twin Cities region.
We've informally chatted before when he visited Omaha earlier in the year to do the Security focused event. All the long, he's struck me decent guy with a good grasp on the technology and the materials. He also stood out in my mind as a great example of what Toastmasters doesn't and can't teach out about speaking in the real-world.
This Thursday, it felt like we really connected.
The presentations he made went well except for one thing: there was a cricket in the audio system. The first presentation was about Report Services. I'm pleased to report that Mike turned me on to using the Report Viewer control for WinForm applications. Guess I still have lots to learn about that product. The next section was using Application Blocks. While I'm glad he covered these, I'm still struggling to see why I'd want to go to all of the work of using a publisher model for exception management. Maybe my view of things is too shallow. Mike also covered ASP.NET 2.0 and the auto-form demo got lots of "ohhhh" and "ahhhs." Finally, he covered Yukon. Obviously, this got the most of my attention. Some notes for my Omaha readers:
- This is probably the last time you'll see SQL Workbench as it has been replaced with something called "SQL Server Management Studio." Same concept though.
- The "::" method accessor for CLR-types as been replaced with "." Thus making it more in keeping with C# and VB.NET
- The XQuery example shown was interesting in that it was an actual XPath statement rather than a FLWR constructor.
What completely pleased me to no end about this event is that almost from the time it started to the time it end, the room was packed to standing room only! Way to go Omaha!
I noticed something else that day about Mike. He was much more relaxed and actually seemed to be having fun presenting to us. Later in the day, he confided that he really loves that -- he enjoys presenting. It's obvious: he so gets on a roll when the crowd is engaging with him. That's not something you can learn, IMHO, that's just being a good speaker.
Later that night, we had one of the best Omaha.NET User Group meetings I can remember this year. Our own Dave Bettin did a rich drill down into Indigo. I really feel like I understand that stack much better now. Dave also demonstrated that once he relaxed, he had fun presenting.
After the User Group meeting, many of us headed towards the Old Chicago on West Maple for a .NET Pub Club. Those are great because you can really spend time talking to somebody about their projects, problems and ideas. But I found myself just stealing glimpses of Mike, seeing how he interacted and engaged with people on a one-to-one basis. You could tell he was still getting energized from the engagement.
Mike was nice enough to chat with me for a while after the Pub Club about the things we really feel passionate about: the technology, writing and speaking. Totally enjoyable. I just hope that somebody in every town that gets a DCC visit has as good of experience as I did.