Fear and Loathing

Daniel has a good point about not distracting the audience with third-party add-ins. However if you're coding something live, bring on ReSharper, TestDriven.NET, and all your other tools. In agile talks, you're often demoing not only what you're doing, but how you're doing it. It would be like demonstrating how to build Windows Forms without using the Forms Designer. Personally I feel no guilt in using ReSharper in code-focused demos.

They do help to move the demo along a bit faster.

My theory is, if you're teaching or doing a demo for a 101 level crowd keep the third-party products at home.  It'll confuse them, they'll go looking for the little light bulbs or think they screwed something up when their code doesn't magically appear like yours did. Using R# for a 101-level screencast is even worse.

Now if you're preaching to an advanced crowd they want to get to the concepts as fast as possible and probably have their own 15 plugins and either they'll be nodding in agreement with your choice of R# or they'll battle you over why you're not using Product X instead :)

That's just my rule of thumb.

I would also use R#, but maybe you can inform your audience up front and use a tool like weblogs.asp.net/.../train-to-be-a-keyboard-master-with-keyboard-jedi.aspx to bring the used shortcuts on screen.

Aaron: Sounds like a self-serving goal. "Move my demo along faster at the expense of not all of the audience keeping up with me".

James: Comparing a built-in tool (forms designer) with a 3rd party tool (Resharper) misses the point I was making: audience familiarity with what you are doing. On your other point: if you think that a particular talk on teaching Agile cannot be done without Resharper then fair enough (seriously). However, as an attendee I would expect to see that as part of the abstract (along with Visual Studio which no doubt you mention), so I know what the dependencies of the talk are.

Bill: Thanks for picking up on the 2 points that I admitted are the most controversial :).

A further analogy I have (if you don't mind me sharing here) is with the Parallel Extensions library. When I show it to people, I can use lambdas and make my code more concise but I don't and instead use anonymous methods; that way I minimise what I am expecting the audience to know while they are learning a brand new API. It makes my life more difficult, but making my life easy is not why I am up there on stage IMO. Compare the ugly code (normal) with the beautiful code (lambdas) to see what I mean (and, yes, showing the ugly code is what is easier to follow for most people):

www.danielmoth.com/.../SomeMethod_normal.png

www.danielmoth.com/.../SomeMethod_lambdas.png

I use ReSharper on my demos in my classroom. I think it's important to use/talk about "things" that can help us, programmers, to improve our work and ReSharper it's a tool from god :)

Bruno: There are many good things developers need to know, but I hope when they leave my sessions they learn the one thing I promised in the abstract, and not a brain dump of everything that is good in my head/arsenal ;). Anyway, I found an oxymoron in your statement. You are using the words "demos" and "classroom" in the same sentence. Maybe I should do a post on the difference between "75 minute sessions" and "Day(s) of training"... or maybe the difference between "samples" VS "demos" VS "documentation" VS "real code"... Thanks for the idea!

Bil,

I wouldn't take you seriously as a presenter on code centric topics if I didn't see a ReSharper (or other tool) menu on your Visual Studio window.  If you don't do enough coding to feel the pain of not having a ReSharper, then you don't do enough coding to be able to speak about coding.

In all seriousness though, ReSharper adds a lot of code navigation ability that's lacking in naked VS.  It's frequently valuable in demos and talks to get around the code fast to find what you're looking for to answer questions.  I feel better going in with R# for only that reason.

usually R# was hogging my IDE, so i got used to work without it.

I don't buy the argument that you'll lose some audience members. Because the counter is that you'll inspire others to look into getting a tool that will make them more productive. How dumb do you want to assume your audience is that they can't follow along when you create a class with a few keystrokes?

I like to assume people are smart and have them prove me wrong than the other way around. Leave teaching to the lowest common denominator to the public school system.

It's hard for some people to follow a presenter when they use tools that the audience has never seen before.  On the other hand, if you show all your nifty toys to the audience while you're presenting, there's a good chance that I will see some new tool that I didn't know about that will make me a more efficient developer or I'll see a new way to use a tool that I already know about that will help me out also.  This happened during one of Oren's presentations at DevTeach where I learned things about Rhino that have saved me probably hours of time.  Overall, I say use your tools but assume the audience knows nothing about them and you'll have to explain as you go.  Remember, developers are smart so we'll pick up on whatever you're doing if you explain it well the first time.,

Kyle: To be clear, nobody is assuming anyone else to be dumb. My view is that if I bring in something new during a demo then I need to explain it. During a demo I just don't want to waste any cycles explaining anything beyond the absolute minimum.

Speaking from an audience attendee perspective, I really enjoy watching a  presentation where the presenter is using a productivity tool I've never seen before. This is a value-add for me as I not only learn about the presentation topic, I learn some new unrelated tricks that can help me as well.

I remember watching a demo given by John Bristowe and I noted the "zoomit" tool he was using to magnify his screen. I have found this tool to be invaluable in presentations, and company board room sessions. I'm really thankful to John for making me aware of this tool.

Speaking from a presenter perspective, I have noticed that sometimes people will interrupt mid stream and ask "What's that?" (Referring to some tool such as ReSharper). I don't see the harm in that as I assume they are asking in the same context as I outlined above.

If someone walks away from my presentation learning something new that can help them, even if it is a productivity or presentation tool I've been using, then mission accomplished I say.

I think using R# during demo's is fine, I have done it and think it is fine.  However, what you need to be careful of is using keyboard short cuts.  The problem is YOU know what shortcut you just used, but your viewers do not.  This can lead to confusion.

My points.  

3rd party tools ok by me

Shortcuts should be avoided if possible.

Daniel Moth: Maybe i used the wrong words. But your idea of a post about that subject is very interesting. I'll be waiting for that post :)