Optimizing Visual Studio For Presentations

Tips and tricks to improve your knowledge sharing sessions

Published in

Slalom Build

4 min readFeb 8, 2021

When attending technical conferences like Microsoft Build or Ignite, it’s common to see presenters writing code on their computers in realtime. This can be difficult for the audience to follow, so presenters have found workarounds by using additional software to do clever things, such as visually displaying the keystroke combinations they’re pressing in a corner of the screen, or rapidly and seamlessly zooming in and highlighting various content on the screen.

Now that we’ve shifted to largely remote work, we can also make good use of these presentational tools in our daily lives as we present our code to remote colleagues. In this article, I’ll highlight three software tools that will improve your technical presentations by helping you communicate with your audience more effectively!

ZoomIt

Have you been in meetings where the presenter tries to call your attention to some text by highlighting it inline, or tries to show you something on the screen by circling the mouse pointer around it? This is usually distracting, and can be hard to follow.

ZoomIt is a tool that I use regularly because it quickly and seamlessly allows you to zoom into any area of the screen, regardless of the application you’re using at the time. On top of this, it also allows you to add annotations to your presentation content, such as text, arrows and boxes.

Here’s an example where I am annotating the text of this Medium article with a red box and arrows to draw attention to it:

You can download ZoomIt here. After installing, it’s pretty easy to use — You can find the keyboard shortcuts here.

Personally, I don’t use the zooming feature much, but rather use it for drawing annotations on the screen. Some common annotations and shortcuts that I use:

Enter Drawing Mode: Press Ctrl + 2 to enter into drawing mode. This mode can be exited with a right click.
Draw Rectangles: Press and hold Ctrl and drag the mouse.
Draw Arrows: Press and hold Ctrl + Shift and drag the mouse.
Add Text: Press t

With ZoomIt, you can annotate in your screen and get your message across a little bit better. Try it out!

Carnac

Carnac allows presenters to show a visual representation of their key stroke combinations on-screen, so that viewers are able to see text indicating the actual buttons pressed on a portion of the screen.

This makes it much easier to give the audience insight into commands being triggered by the presenter. Rather than making the presenter narrate their key presses and having the audience observe the results, the audience can simply watch as the commands are typed, and the presenter need not interrupt the flow of their explanation to focus on the details of a specific command.

You can find Carnac here, with step-by-step instructions on how to install and configure it here.

Ligatures

Ligatures are not really an external tool or a feature of an IDE, but rather a feature of the font your computer uses. I use ligatures for two primary reasons: 1) They save horizontal space and 2) They make code more readable.

A ligature is a font glyph that is created & displayed when two (or more) subsequent characters are joined together into one. Note that this only affects how the characters are visualized, and does not affect the actual characters in the source code. For example, the glyph ≥ is a ligature created from the combination of the > and = characters, but while ≥ is displayed on-screen, the actual code still contains both characters (>=), so the code still compiles without modifications.

Here’s an example of what a ligature-enabled font looks like in Visual Studio. If you didn’t make any major configuration changes, you’re probably using the “Consolas” font. This is what my Visual Studio looks like with the Consolas font (note the “standard looking” >=and != characters):

This is how it looks with the “Cascadia Code” font instead, which uses ligatures (note the “combined” ≥ and ≠ ligature characters):

Here is a step-by-step guide on configuring Visual Studio to use ligatures.

Conclusion

In the past, it was easy to to show my code to someone in person, pointing to on-screen areas I want to emphasize with my finger. Nowadays, this happens far less frequently, as we move into a world that’s increasingly virtual, with fewer face-to-face meetings and events.

As we discover more challenges with our daily lives becoming virtual, it’s only natural to introduce specialized tools to our remote presentation workflow, both to make our lives easier as presenters, and to improve audience comprehension without interrupting flow. I hope you find these tools useful — I know I use them daily.