David M Williams
Thursday, 10 September 2009 20:32
IT People -
Training
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Meet Sara Ford. She’s the program manager in charge of Microsoft’s answer to SourceForge, CodePlex. She’s also responsible for donating some $29,000 to families affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Sara Ford is presently in Australia to speak at
Microsoft’s Tech-Ed. She stopped to talk to iTWire and believe me, having Sara Ford stop moving seems to be a feat in itself.
Ford’s petite frame hides away a high-energy personality that works and works, and when she isn’t working, she’s spending time preparing for her second Karate black belt or hiking or cycling.
Prior to her current role with CodePlex, Ford began her time at Microsoft working on accessibility for Visual Studio. “How would a blind person interact with Visual Studio,” she mused. In a move that would drive most crazy, Ford determined to use her computer for three months with the monitor switched off and only working with a screen reader.
During this time she discovered the first incarnation of Visual Studio.NET would crash if Intellisense was used while a screen reader was active. The fault was subsequently resolved in Visual Studio.NET 2003.
She also wrestled for 10 days with a problem a blind programmer mailed to her, his Windows’ screen reader crashing whenever he opened his project in Visual Studio.
After trying every route, Ford ultimately asked the developer how big his code files were. The answer was a whopping half a million characters in one single file. It turned out the screen reader could only handle a maximum of 499,999 characters before exceeding its buffer.
In one of several magical moments she describes, Ford says she met this programmer in person a year later at a conference. He thanked her for her persistence on the problem, with his ability to continue programming helping make him feel he still had contributions to make despite his lack of sight.
In a move characteristic of Sara Ford, she decided one day to blog a tip on Visual Studio every single day for a year except weekends, joking she was “too cheap to tip on weekends.”
Ford kept this up for 382 days documenting more tips than many would think might exist. Not surprisingly, one of Ford’s topics at Tech-Ed is her list of “Top 25 Visual Studio tips.”
The Visual Studio tips became a highly popular addition to Ford’s blog and the idea struck that she could compile and expand on them in a book. “
Visual Studio Tips” was born, published by Microsoft Press.
For anyone who makes a living working in Visual Studio the content of Ford’s book can boost productivity. However, the story of the book didn’t end with its publication.
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