I will be presenting at the Avans Hogeschool Tilburg this week and wanted to apply a trick I first saw by Juval Lowy in his architecture master class: starting Visual Studio from within the presentation directly. Why would you want to do this? Because it looks cool of course!

After a bit of Googling around I found it all is very, very easy to do. Just download a suitable VS2010 / VS2008 icon. As I was lazy I went straight to Google images and found these:

I cleaned up the 2010 icon a bit in Paint as I will be presenting in VS2010 this week, if you know where to get the proper icons drop a line in the comments.

Now, in PowerPoint paste any of the icons. Select the image and go to Insert, Action => Run program.

Insert the path to your devenv.exe, typically this will be "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" on a Windows 7 machine.

This will start VS2010 but you can (and should) add the path to the solution file.

Like it, comments? Find the comment button and let me know!