I believe in telling the truth, I think that a genuine building critics when it is delivered in a professional way is very important for both sides. I think that the blogging platform puts us in a unique position where our thoughts and criticism can be heard up. Even an experienced lecturer may err and each and everyone us can learn and improve. Maybe because of the natrue of live blogging, criticism is more impulsive but the issues are still there.
I have been to good lectures and bad ones, but this one really surprised me. The session just didn't fulfill it's promises, and Laurence is a nice guy, I don't know how a 300 level session becomes a 100 in a way like this.
From the the discription of the session, you are let to the belief that this is going to be a "Getting dirt all over our hands" session.
It been a while since I used Silverlight and I wanted to see what have changed between the Silverlight 1.1 alpha version I knew and now.
To my great disappiontment we never got to the code, well I'm little exaggerating here in here, we do got into code, but it was in the last 5 minutes and it hadn't had much impact over the session, it was the regular marketing style presentations about Silverlight, which was already shown in the Keynote.
Life is short, I move on :)
Ariel