I do my share of technical presentations to clients and the Florida .NET Developer Community. Often I am in Visual Studio 2008 walking through production code or code samples.
There are times when I would like to magnify the screen ( screen zoom ) so that others can see the code easier and perhaps even highlight the code ( screen annotation ) so I can better draw attention to the code I am presenting. I was looking for such a tool the other day for a presentation when I came across ZoomIt, which is a free screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations.
ZoomIt is perfect for my needs. I mean absolutely perfect for showing off Visual Studio 2008 Sample Code in your presentations to user groups, codecamps, clients, etc.
Just so you have the full picture, here I am in front of my client running Visual Studio 2008 on my MacBook Pro using VMware Fusion. I have my presentation in Apple Keynotes and I flip over to my code in Visual Studio 2008 and press Ctrl - 1 ( the default ) to activate ZoomIt and begin zooming in and out of the code with the mousewheel. I then hit the left mouse button to freeze the screen and start drawing and erasing little boxes, ovals, and lines around the code to highlight it as I am discussing each piece. As soon as I am done discussing the code, I hit the ESC Key to leave ZoomIt and return back to Visual Studio 2008. It might sound a little crazy, hard to do, or even busy, but honestly it was really, really slick.
Seriously, if you give technical presentations where you are showing off sample code in Visual Studio 2008 and you wish to zoom in and out of the code as well as perhaps annotate the code as you talk, ZoomIt might be the tool for you. I absolutely love it, and hey, it's free!
Here is a sample snapshot of zoomed and annotated code from my recent screencast, Enterprise Library 4.0 Data Access Application Block ( DAAB ) and Unity IoC Screencast. Note I didn't use ZoomIt in the screencast, I am just using sample code from the screencast. The code doesn't look zoomed since I had to shrink it for the blog, but you can see where I am drawing boxes around the code on the screen and can even type on it if I want. Very cool.
Download ZoomIt here.
Check out other .NET Developer Tools.
Hope this helps.
David Hayden