Last night I gave a short technical presentation in Sydney at one of my employer's monthly customer marketing events. Nothing too fancy, 30 minutes on 'What's new in Windows Workflow (WF) in version 3.5' to about 60 people.

However, the choice of topic and slides weren't my own (credit: Chris Padgett); also some time in the afternoon I started coming down with a mild case of the perennial winter nose/throat infection (I am on the cold & flu today) and I was feeling pretty nervous as a result of it being over a year since I formally stood up in front of a group bigger than 1...heading for a train wreck, or so I thought...

As it turned out, the event didn't go too badly (no disastrous demo crashes or even (noticeably) bad pauses) but then again, I still haven't seen the collated feedback forms; and either way I was still outclassed in both material and presentation by my colleague who followed me with an excellent presentation on production debugging.

Anyway, the most important thing to remember is that these things are never quite as bad as you think!