Last night, at the North New Jersey .Net User Group (N3UG), I gave a presentation on my Encrypted Connection Strings project, which has been a GotDotNet user sample since last summer. It is a pretty simple project, which you will not need once Whidbey is release, but it is great for those new to .Net (which is a good part of this user group, since the majority of attendees are students in the host company's (SetFocus) .Net class. Instead of just writing the code during the presentation (a skill that I haven’t mastered), I was going to do the next best thing and walk the folks thru the design by building a UML sequence diagram of the different usage scenarios. But during the short Powerpoint presentation, I noticed more than a few glazed looks, and figured that this was not the place for UML.
So I chickened out on dropped back to walking thru the code. Not really something I wanted to do, but I know I would have lost a good deal of the people I wanted to get thru to. You know, I really like using whiteboards to create informal diagrams to explain systems, and I really haven’t found the equivalent version for a PC. Because all projectors are not high resolution machines, things can tend to look bad on a projector, when they look great on a laptop, so things like Visio are pretty poor as a whiteboard replacement. Now, if I could combine a TabletPC with a cross between OneNote and Visio, that would be a cool app to do presentations with.