With bombarding my audience at the beginning and forcing them to ask questions I will know if I need being slowly or faster on some moments.

Thanks.

May be I’ll go then All (I think) VISUG sessions are in English (it’s like that when 3 national languages)

You talk about “VISUG people” and session in English or Dutch ….
Where is your session ? In Belgium ?

not sure about that, although they might be… kinda depends on the VISUG people i guess. I also don’t know if the session is going to be in English, or Dutch

I presume this session will be webcasted (and recorded), looking forward to see those webcasts

Thanks

i’ve been told that i can assume knowledge about ORM (in general) so there’s no need to get into explaining ORM concepts. Another part of the session will be about Entity Framework (probably), so i don’t need to get into that either. In fact, i’d like to make it through my presentation without mentioning any other ORM product. NHibernate’s feature set is extensive enough that it can be showed off and impress people on its own merits without having to mention downsides to competing products IMO.

Basically i just want to show what it can do, how it can help people, and along the way, try to get rid of some myths surrounding nhibernate, particularly here in Belgium. I’ve heard a lot of false statements regarding nhibernate, and i’ve seen a lot of ignorance regarding it and a lot of people are unfortunately letting that influence certain decisions.

a) cover some concepts (whats an ORM, what problems does it solve)
b) why NH vs another ORM technology (e.g. what features differentiate it from other ORM offerings)
c) show some of the features in action to whet the appetite of attendees to go learn more on their own (e.g., generate the schema from the hbm files, show how simple queries in HQL or criteria work, show how easy it is to enable caching, etc.)

Most of these kinds of talks tend to fail when they attempt to TEACH rather than generate interest as 45 minutes = just too short a time for teaching anything as complex as NH IMO. In 45 minutes it can be hard to even…

a) build even a single-table DB
b) create even the simplest object model
c) create just one mapping file
d) query for even one object

I know I’m biased towards longer sessions (after all, my NH screencast teaching series was *15* sessions at about 1.5 hours each ) but even in the short agenda I just listed above there are likely to be enough questions, etc. that you could easily run out of time even then.

I’d (personally) be very interested in seeing what you eventually come up with b/c I think its important for there to some way to introduce people to NH within the typical constraints of a 45-60 minute session (typ length for most dev presentations) but I haven’t come up with such a way myself yet…

HTH,

-Steve B.

01: Write down all your favourite things, because you will appear enthusiastic and that will keep everyone interested.
02: Show, don’t teach.
03: Answer questions along the way.
04: If you run out of time (which I doubt) ask the audience for questions + if they want to see something else (give options).

By the end of that members of the audience will undoubtedly want to ask for more details about something specific that they have seen.

no problem to mention the details about the upcoming VISUG session. We just have to take care of finding an appropriate date and location and also tune the format of the session a bit …

Expect that people will probably know what an ORM tool does, but don’t expect them to have already some hands-on experience with NHibernate!

Good luck with your preparations!

I think you allready have a nice agenda to fill the 45 minutes, it should be doable in my opinion as long as you do not spend to much time on the demo’s, prep them in advance

But you should definitly ask for more sessions to cover the really interesting stuff like interceptors, custom types etc…

If I’m you, here are my suggestions

1. You can have 2-3 sessions over span of days, believe me people would love to participate
2. Session-1: Speak high-level overview of NHibernate.
Why its used
What are the advantages/disadvantages
What all things one should be aware of
When to use it & when NOT to use it
…

3. Session-2: Iterate Session-1 with Simple –> Moderate example(s).
“Hello World” example could be your Level-1 Demo

4. Session-3: Take a real-life example which people can relate easily & show the demo
In this session explicitly DEMO the disadvantages of features

5. Session-4: Can go one level higher…

Hope that helps