Background

We have read a lot of books
We have attended courses
We have been taught by the best in the world when it comes to presentation skills.

But all of them focus on presenting a "normal" presentation.
Basically, Powerpoint, gestures, and talking, but none talk about code.
I've been a speaker for many years. Coding and talking on stage are two very different things.
Talking and coding at the same time is a skill all by it self.
I have seen the best presenters in tech fail miserably on stage when combining the two.

In my mind, there are a couple of different versions I've seen.

The power pointer

Showing code on a Powerpoint slide or static in some way

This is the simplest way, and in many cases this is all we need.
We don't even have to exit Powerpoint to switch to Visual Studio.

The Chef

This is something I did earlier

Showing finished code in Visual Studio
This way, we can get a bit more help from Visual Studio, but we don't have to watch the presenter type anything.
These methods don't leave a lot of room for making any error (since all the code is already written), but they also have a lot of code on the screen and can be hard to follow.

The snippeteer

There are a few different versions of the snippeteer.
Copy and paste code from a text document or just drag it in from somewhere.
Both methods are hard to follow even if we go through each line it can be hard to follow.
There are things happening on the screen, the dragging or copying and pasting, which are things that I, as an audience member, won't do when I try this at home.

The DIY

The presenter who writes everything from scratch.

This method is the most real version, but the audience also get to see the typos, the reading from a paper with famous quotes like "where were we?", "Did I get everything?"
This is the best version if you can get the best possible experience, no typos, no errors, and so on.
But coding on stage is a challenge, and there are pretty few who can handle all the tasks at the same time.
Talking, typing, and getting everything right.

What if there was a way to combine the best of all these methods?
The flexibility of typing yourself, with the security and accuracy of a snippet, without pasting big chunks of code

The Raccoon

If you can reach the keyboard, you are all set

By using the StageCoder extension, you will not only get a perfect score when it comes to hitting the right character, you can be as fast or slow as you need to be to get the point across. No more looking at notes, no more typos, No more trying to think of an variable name =D
We are happy to have built Stage Coder, a Visual Studio extenstion that lets you type out snippets of code.
You store them as snippets, so they can be used as ordinary snippets as well if you would like to.
We have been using this extension for a couple of years now, and we have heard people say, "Wow, what a great demo" and "He's FAST at typing and not a single mistake!"