Monday, September 19, 2011

'Demo' Visual Studio Instance

Recently, I have been giving more presentations and talks to people that don't involve PowerPoint for most of the presentation. It's been development level talks and demos that involve Visual Studio the majority of the time. A problem that I, and many others, have is that Visual Studio is currently configured to be productive for me; not everyone in the audience. I have ReSharper installed, toolbar buttons trimmed to only the essentials (things I haven't memorized the keyboard shortcuts to), tool/output windows moved around, font/colors changed, etc. All of these things make it hard for others to follow what I am doing.

One solution a lot of people have been using is to create a separate user account on their machine and give their demos from that. It works, but you have to keep switching user accounts. After a while, these gets tedious.

Another approach is to export your daily development settings into a Visual Studio settings file (ie daily.vssettings), make the changes to the settings you want for giving demos, and then export those settings into another settings file (demos.vssettings). You could then just import the settings for whatever 'mode' you will be working in. Again, a little tedious, but at least you didn't have to go so far as creating a new user account.

A nice alternative that sits somewhere in the middle is to use the Experimental Instance of  Visual Studio. The details can be found in this blog post:  http://codermike.com/vs2010-demo-instance

Just create a shortcut on your desktop ('Visual Studio 2010 Demo') that starts Visual Studio in a 'Experimental' instance and there you go! Much easier!  :)

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