I am just returned from an excellent holiday in New Zealand, wherein I talked about MVC 3 at the first ever WDCNZ in Wellington.

On the day of the talk I was deathly ill, so it was a very much less animated talk than I wanted to give, but still enjoyable (for me, if not the audience). I missed out on seeing the rest of the conference, which is a real bugger.

In particular I wanted to see Paul Irish on Html5, but I did at least get to meet him for a quick chat the day before. Other speakers I met the day before were pretty interesting to talk to and I very much wanted to see the talks by Kirk Jackson and Jeffrey Wegesin, among others.

Here's my slides, using an updated version of Higgins. You'll need to unzip them, then you can see the readme file, the slides themselves (by viewing higgins.html) or look at the included code.

Slides and Code for 'Live Coding Asp.net MVC 3'

The talk covers Razor syntax, Display and Editor Templates, custom Code Templates and custom Project templates. Thankfully, there is no video.

Joseph Cooney built a special utility to help with the talk, called 'BigNote' -- available from bignote.codeplex.com.

This is a handy tool for presenters. Invoke it with a hotkey (ctrl-F1) and then it lets you write in giant letters on top of the desktop. Very slick.

I had a slight panic during the talk when I realised that Joe Cooney, creator of ComputerUnlocked.com could have used the opportunity to slip any kind of nasty prank into the tool, just to punk me in front of a room full of strangers. But luckily he slipped up and missed the opportunity.

One other thing I ought to mention: the Dell laptop I bought in anticipation of the presentation turned out to be a total dud. I was only rescued the day before leaving Australia when Paul Stovell managed to hook me up with an old laptop of his, which performed flawlessly. Thanks Paul!