Doug Seven is one of the track chairs for the track that I'm speaking in at TechEd Developer. I was talking to him the other day about finding the line between the "Presentation Zen" type of presentation (where an extreme example would be a slide with nothing more than a smiley face on it) and a presentation that will be useful to attendees (or other downloaders) after the fact that has actual content on it as the presenter is no longer there to fill in the blanks.

He gave me a great suggestion - prepare two decks. take my typical "stand-alone" decks which is very dense, the make a copy of it and strip the copy down. Way down.

So many of the bullet points are things I'm talking about. Why should the attendees need to be destracted by so many details on the deck when I'm talking about them anyway?

But, and here's what's great about this idea - use the dense deck to share with attendees after the fact. All of the details that I talked about are now there right on the deck for their benefit.

I love this idea so much that I did it to my decks for the DevSummit. I have done one of my sessions already using the stripped down deck, then gave the stand-alone version of the deck to the track chair to put on the website.

I'm doing a silverlight talk this afternoon and cut the deck in half and on the remaining slides, removed a lot of content and replaced some of it with images instead. No smiley faces though.

I get to have my cake and eat it to and I think it's a win-win for the attendees during and after the live session.