The feedback from DDD8 has come in, in anonymous form and for the most part I'm completely overwhelmed by the positive response the talk garnered from the people who attended the talk.
However, I get the feeling my talk managed to polarise the room somewhat and I'd like to respond to those that went completely the opposite way with their responses and apologise if I went a different direction to what they expected!
Varied Demos
Okay, no defence here at all - showing you all the same website over and over again until I got around to showing the final product of the concepts( NerdDinner) was a bit unfair - I'll try to put together the demos a bit earlier than 3am the night before next time :)
I think perhaps concentrating on NerdDinner from the start and showing how I built that up might have helped, but when I put the demos together I was struggling to simplify that enough for the demos to make sense in their own right (hence the hurried individual ones)
Not enough Detail
I never intended on going into detail on the concepts outlined - I don't feel you ever can go into detail in a talk that lasts less than an hour - nevertheless, if you'd like more detail you're all more than welcome to respond to my series on multi-tenancy with questions and more feedback!
I already have a longer slot booked at one user group - and would be happy to spend more time on the subject at any other user groups or developer meet-ups - just ask.
Too technical
I should have made clear in my summary that a prior knowledge of ASP.NET MVC would be useful - and I apologise for this - a few people complained about this and I'll know next time to be more up front about what I intend on covering in a session.
Too fast
This is probably one of the most subjective responses I had, and a lot of people said they loved the pace - which kept them awake and interested throughout the talk. I don't think I'll change this in my future talks (although I might try to talk slower), but another disclaimer may well not go amiss "This talk will be fast-paced and try to throw as much information at you in an hour as your brain can cope with"
Wrong approach
Okay, only one person mentioned this - and said I should be using IOC to solve the issues I outlined. I'm not entirely sure (apart from the controllers) where this would have helped - so feel free to contribute to the multi-tenancy conversation in the comments of this blog when I get to that point whoever you are!
I was also criticised by the same person for even wanting to host the same application under the same IIS instance - I believe I covered this as an option in one of my slides however and I was certainly not suggesting that I recommended keeping your customers in one basket.
I think there are masses of conversations and discussions to be had over the approach I took to solving the problem - which is why I'm now doing this blog series - to get the discussion going and come to an agreed solution between us all.
Poor distribution of Swag
Yes yes yes, I'm sorry - I'm really bad at this kind of thing because it's not something I'm interested in - I'll try to do better next time.
Too nervous
Guilty as charged, my first time speaking in a while - I'll try to be more confident next time
Too confident/arrogant
Towards the end perhaps you're right, I'm trying to work out whether this is better or worse than the above!
Ending on a high note
In response to all the people who said my talk had great pace, great content, that it was incredibly useful and relevant, that the subject area had justice given to it, and that I clearly knew what I was talking about - thanks a bunch, rest assured that the above comments have balanced out the ego and I can still fit through doors.
Thanks to everybody who attended and asked questions - I'll be seeing you all again shortly no doubt.