My talk today at CodeCampSA was on SQL 2008 change tracking and how that works with the new Microsoft Sync Framework. It went ok up until I put the VM into full-screen mode, which promptly stopped the display on the projector. Arrgh! A quick fumble around and running the ATI video utility got things working again. Doubly embarrassing as I'd just made a comment about the whole "demo gods" thing so that drew a few smart comments!

Then, my "prepared earlier" demo failed to work. I suspect it’s because just an hour before my talk, I decided to add an extra table to my test database. That probably wasn’t a very wise thing to do.

I then asked Timothy (fellow developer from ABB and Sync Framework whiz) to join me out the front and demonstrate how to create custom client and server providers. I realise now that I should have given him much more time, as he did a great job, but with time against us we couldn't finish it properly. I really should have given him more chance to prepare rather than throwing him in the deep end with only 10 minutes to go.

Even with all that, I still stand by my dismissal of "demo gods" comments that so many presenters like to make. But I'm happy to admit that I'm not perfect rather than blame someone (or something) else.

So I was feeling a bit disappointed with how that went, but things were about to change for the better.

As I mentioned, Paul ran a clever quiz competition to give away a Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium.

Guess who won?

Yep, yours truly!!! Wow, and they don't sell these for peanuts either!

So now I have a dilemma - I realise this is a very valuable resource, probably not something I'd ever get to buy myself. But is it something that I'm going to be able to make good use of? I'm not sure.. maybe there are some other organisations that this could benefit much more.

I'll think about it before I decide what to do. But a warning, don't bother contacting me asking me to give it to you! The answer to those requests will be "Sorry, No".

I could give it to my Mum, to say thanks for lending me her laptop to use today, but I have a feeling she might not know what to do with it :-)

Of course I may still decide to keep it. Otherwise I'll be deciding what to do with it soon (making sure what ever happens complies with Microsoft's licensing/conditions).