A toolset which helps deploy and hold a live coding session using Visual Studio. The toolset consists of the deployment tool (deploy.exe), and Visual Studio extension (LiveCoder).

Solution consists of these projects:

• LiveCoder.Deployer.Tool - the deployment tool. Builds into Windows command-line executable application named deploy.exe.
• LiveCoder.Extension - the extension which plays snippets deployed by the deployment tool.
• LiveCoder.Deployer - common types used for deployment; this project is intended to be used both from the command-line tool and from the Visual Studio extension.
• LiveCoder.Common - general-purpose types.
• Demo - an example project which includes PowerPoint presentation and snippets file. This project can be deployed and demonstrated using the Live Coder.

After building the LiveCoder.Extension project, it should create livecoder.vsix in the build output directory. Install this extension to Visual Studio. The tool was tested in Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 Community Edition.

After building LiveCoder.Deployer.Tool, it will produce deploy.exe tool in the output directory. Move this tool to a location in PATH, so that you can execute it from source code directories.

With both tools built and installed, the next step is to try a live coding demo on the Demo project. Open command prompt and (optionally) change directory to the directory containing Demo.sln. This directory contains:

• Demo.sln and Demo directory with the project
• demo.snippet with all snippets for the demonstration. Snippets are named snp01, snp02, snp03...
• slides.pptx - a sample PowerPoint presentation

The first step in presenting is to deploy all the materials. That is done by using deploy -src <dir> and then adding specialized options. When executed in the directory which already contains all the files to be deployed, begin with deploy -src ..

You can explore deployment options by simply typing deploy - that will print out the current list of flags with explanations.

In a typical scenario, when beginning a presentation, one would copy all files and open them: deploy -src . -copy-all -open This command, when executed, will first create a destination directory under C:\Demo. It will then copy all files in the current directory and its subdirectories. Finally, a .sln file and any *.pptx files will be open using the default handlers for their file types.

Once the deployment is done, simply use the Next command installed by the Live Coder Visual Studio extension to execute the demo one step at a time. It is strongly advised to assign a keyboard shortcut to the Next command. Suggested shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+A.

Presentation should contain a single file with extension .snippet, which is an XML file in the Visual Studio snippets format. Note that, although Visual Studio only supports one snippet per file, this particular file used for the demo should contain all snippets. The deploy.exe tool will then separate these snippets correctly.

Snippets in the file should be named snp01, snp02, snp03, etc.

There is a special form of snippets which represents a non-executable comment. They are writeen as snp01.1, snp01.2, etc. These snippets are only meant to remind the speaker. When the tool "executes" them, the line that contains the snippet is simply deleted. Make sure that nothing else is located on the line which contains the comment snippet, or otherwise that additional content will be deleted, too.

To better understand how snippets are written and organized, feel free to deploy and execute the Demo project using the Live Coder extension.