Large fonts, presentations and Vista

I recently gave a presentation on Windows Workflow Foundation at CINNUG. I had decided like a week and half before hand to upgrade to Vista on my LS800 tablet. Some might say that was a bad decision given the fact that I had an upcoming presentation; however, things worked out well (this time). The only hiccup was that the User Account Control seemed to really throw a number on one or two of my Demos, so I turned it off for the presentation.

One of the things the upgrade did was cause me to have to look all over the place for things. For example, in XP I would turn on Large Fonts in the settings (Display Properties -> Appearance tab -> Font size -> Large Fonts). This had the benefit of making the fonts for all the menus and windows in VS.Net 2005* easier to read on a projector screen. You can easily adjust the actual code font size, but all the other windows (i.e., Solution Explorer, Debug Output, etc.) are still small and adjusting the Font Size in the Display Properties would help with that.

When I went to find Large Fonts on Vista I was surprised to find that it wasn’t there. I could affect the DPI of my fonts, which can yield the same result; however, changing this requires a reboot! Errr, ouch. You can also go through the Personalize options in Vista and hand crank all the font sizes in the Advanced Appearance settings to get this done, but again….ouch. I need to create a script that will do this for me or set up a theme.

On a related note during the presentation I used a tool called ZoomIt to “zoom” in on things on the screen. I got a lot of comments on it afterwards so it sounds like it was a good idea. ZoomIt can zoom in to multiple levels, allows you to draw on the screen and even has a count down timer for breaks during your presentation or meeting. You can read what Hanselman had to say about it, which is where I picked it up from.

Vista does have the idea of Presentation settings. Check out the mobility settings by hitting Win-X (not sure if that is on all SKUs or not). Click on the Presentation Settings button and you can turn off the screen saver, control the volume, connect other displays and even set your wallpaper differently. All nice options, but it would have been really nice if they had also included set LARGE FONTS!

• Note that in VS.Net 2003 there was a command line switch where you could set the font size for these types of things; however, in VS.Net 2005 that was taken away and studio uses the system font settings. Bummer.