mDb4net

 
event

Last week I was able to give a talk in the local .Net user group, AAnug.

The topic in question was MongoDB and, more specifically, how it can be used by .NET developers (using the official driver).

Code, code, code

It was a mostly code-oriented session but I did not want to type everything myself (horrible typist, worse in front of people if possible), but being helped by a series of code snippets that I could use from LINQPad (no need to fire off heavy Visual Studio instances for simple code snippets).

Snippets

Crafting snippets was not the most fun task in the world (for the lack of a less offensive term) as I could not find a good tool that can edit .snippet files comfortably (leaving out Visual Studio plugins, it runs slow enough already). The one I used (Snippet Editor) does the job, but just that.

Git

I used branches for each topic of the session, so changing to a brand new workspace for the next demo was a matter of checking out a branch. For topics that used LINQPad (majority), I created a /snippets subfolder and configured LINQPad to load custom snippets from it:

linqpad

That way, I only had the snippets I needed for the current topic in Intellisense and I had way less to type, minimizing the amount of embarrassment.

The Result

I feel the session went pretty smooth and I could deliver all the important bits in time (I only overflowed for the “Bonus Tracks”) without rushing. So it is definitely a technique that I will use again for code-heavy topics.
My only fear is that by not having to type it and even though I tried to emphasize what’s important from the code, some people might have felt overwhelmed by everything that happened on the screen. But I did not get negative comments from it, so it might be only an unfounded fear of mine.

You can head to its Git repository to see the contents and even browse the slides in its GitHub Pages site.