Use productivity tools in presentations

Question

I was wondering how people think about using productivity tools like Coderush or Resharper in live demos. Is it a don't and should someone only use the most default settings of the IDE? Or is it ok to speed things up a little during the demo? Also, should you explain you are using this tool during the demo?

Answer 1

It really depends on what you want to demonstrate. This kind of productivity tool are usefull even for demos in order to avoid loosing time on basic technical problems. You may also take advantages of such demos to introduce the features of these tools...

Answer 2

I've seen a lot of presentations where people use these tools and personally I don't mind.

Make sure you tell people that are going to be using the tool and then announce the action that you are about to take. e.g. "I'll use Resharper to extract this method into the Foo class"

Answer 3

I tend to use DevExpress Refactor! Pro, and GhostDoc, when I do code-related presentations. I try to make sure the audience knows what I'm doing by saying out loud what I'm going to do, but I have also built my own custom tool for this, which you can find a beta of here: LVK.ScreenKeys.

Basically the tool will pop up, in the upper right corner of the screen, yellow tooltip/toast-like windows showing the key stroke/sequence I invoked, and also a textual description of what it means, depending on the software it was invoked in.

Before I started using such a tool, I invariably had questions like "what did you do now", and if you don't want to use such a tool (there are others besides mine), I would consider not using more than a few functions of such tools.