I was watching Scott Hansleman’s ASP.NET MVC presentation this morning and noticed him zooming in on various screen areas and drawing around parts of the screen he was talking about during the demo.  “What the hell is he using to do that?” thought I.

Initially I thought it must’ve been a tablet thingy and that if I mentioned it Mitch would get all “nah-ne-nah-ne-nah-nah” on me.  But I did a quick bit of digging and learned that it’s actually a utility from the SysInternals team called ZoomIt - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/ZoomIt.mspx

I’ve downloaded it and played about with it and think it’s fantastic – it makes showing small fonts and display areas (such as the solution panel in Visual Studio) so much easier and avoids the usual presenters question of "Can you guys up the back see that?". I wish I’d known about this in the past. If you haven’t already seen it, I’d recommend getting it and trying it out.

P.S. Don’t worry about the size – it’s all of 74KB to download.