The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

Presentation Guru Guy Kawasaki discusses a rule called 10/20/30 PowerPoint rule in one of his recent blog posts. What is the 10/20/30 PowerPoint rule? He states, “a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Guy argues this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Like they say in the Guinness commercials, "Brilliant!" I'm sold, and the fences this creates really helps keep things simple and easy for everyone presenters and listeners both.

I've started loking for good SilverLight / Windows Presentation Foundation examples.

Here are some I've found so far:

DENOUNCE
Podcast Listener and Blog Reader

NOSTALGIA 
Yahoo! Flickr Browser and Photo Manager

DA.CODE 
Interactive Trivia Game

CINE.VIEW 
Netflix for Your Desktop

Harmony: visualize your music library

One impressive feature of Windows Vista is its support for 3D. This proof-of-concept is a knock-off of Coverflow (recently integrated into iTunes) with a few extra "twists".

de.collage: 13 painters with a view

In French, "décollage", roughly translates to "take off" or "to become unstuck". This application queries the internet to bring famous paintings to your desktop.

Module: the right hand for your desktop

Can't wait for Microsoft Vista's Sidebar? Why not try ours? Simply launch the application, type in your zip code, and away you go.

Echobox: adding voice to design

Design is hard to manage by email. This proof-of-concept facilitates basic design collaboration via FTP.

fp.hue: color conversion for Sparkle

Sometimes you have to make your own tools. This widget converts HEX color values into Sparkle's floating point RGB values.

Windows Vista RTM - Demonstation of Windows ReadyBoost - Google Video

Last week Page Brooks, Chris Reeder, and I were discussing the benifits of Vista's ReadyBoost, especially for laptops. Here's a video that should help demonstrate the power of ReadyBoost.

I've embedded the video below, so if you rss reader supports it you're all set.

The code camp is Saturday, May 12, all day, at the Central Piedmont Community College.

For more information and to register, visit http://www.developersguild.org/codecamp/2007/.

The 2007 Charlotte Code Camp will be held on Saturday, May 12th with CPCC and Microsoft to bring another Code Camp to Charlotte! A full Saturday of "primo" hands-on labs and tech presentations covered up with code, code, and more code.

I'd love to attend the XNA Simulation Labs, but I think I'll attend the Presentations track.

.NET University Labs

This track is designed to give you a good technical introduction to the four new technologies that ship with .NET 3.0: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and Windows CardSpace.

XNA Simulation Labs

XNA is Microsoft's new game development platform for Windows and the XBOX 360. This track is designed to give you a good technical introduction to how to develop a game on these platforms.

Presentations

This non-lab track will present upcoming technologies including Orcas (VS 2007) and LINQ as well as solutions to everyday developer issues like the Building Blocks of a production ASP.NET application and building custom webparts for WSS V3.

Sign up now!

Tim Sneath's post Our First WPF End-To-End Reference Sample: Family.Show caught my eye today, and boy am I glad it did.

I have to admit from what I've seen Microsoft and Vertifo Software have done an outstanding job on Family.Show. It is definitely more than a demo, I'm not sure reference application does it justice.

You can install and run it using ClickOnce, btw. :) Source code is available. Be sure to check out the lab to see more projects.

"Microsoft and Vertigo Software launched of a brand new end-to-end reference sample for WPF."

"Available for download immediately, Family.Show is a genealogy explorer that allows you to create or import a family tree and explore, annotate or save it to XPS."

"Our designers employed every trick in the WPF book– styles, resources, templates, data binding, animation, transforms– to present an innovative visualization of the classic family tree, freeing our developers to concentrate on behind-the-scenes features like XPS, P/Invoke wrapper for Windows Vista common dialogs, and ClickOnce for WPF."

If you are into data models or databases be sure to check out the following:

Library of Free Data Models from DatabaseAnswers.org

Highlights:

1. Here are about 450 very useful 'Kick-Start' Data Models.
2. Ten of the Data Models are featured in the Express Edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
3. Here are the Top 20 Data Models.
4. The site also has a Data Model Search facility.
5. A new Tutorial on Understanding a Database Schema.
6. Awesome FAQ, you will find something cool here.

This site is kind of like the Super DBA's scratch pad. If you look around and you'll find some gems.