Scaling a Talk

As I mentioned a few days ago, we were tweaking the published details of my talk a bit to better reflect the talk style and content. Here's the updated blurb if you haven't seen it.

WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale by Nicholas Allen

Join us for an interactive lunch discussion about different kinds of performance and scale requirements that are a crucial part of any distributed systems development life cycle. Learn the principles of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) throughput and responsiveness optimization. Hear about WCF scalability improvements in the next version of the Microsoft .NET Framework.

You'll notice that it's prominently mentioned that this is a lunch session, which are held in the same rooms as the standard breakout sessions but are a bit shorter in length to give you time to eat and generally presented at a slightly more relaxed pace. One of the reasons I liked the lunch session time is because it was a great fit for the Zen style of the talk.

The schedule for PDC is officially finished, but that just means the schedule that gets printed in the books is not changing. We're still thinking about whether to convert this talk from a lunch session to a standard breakout session. A breakout session is longer and can fit in more content. There's definitely more that I want to say, especially about the future of WCF, than can fit into any length session. However, I think that moving to a longer talk would lead to a more traditional style of presentation. A lot of the reason this talk is so fun is because the format lets me be more creative with how the material is presented. The talk content based on stories and experiences seems to fit in a bit better at lunch.

Which format would you prefer and why?