Sara Ford's Weblog

The Developer Solutions team (the team I joined 4 weeks ago) is proud to announce the release of MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee.”  MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications in Visual Studio...

Agile is the single greatest things a team could do to significantly improve the user experience and quality of their site. Now having said that… If I could go back in time… 3 things I would tell myself about Agile For a long time, I’ve said that my biggest...

The VSCmdShell 1.0 is now available as a Shared Source release on CodePlex . High-level features include Hosting of Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) and Windows PowerShell in a Visual Studio tool window Extensibility support to host other shells within...

Wow, talk about a week of "everything you wanted to know about Open Source, but didn’t know where to start or where to go from there." The tutorials were absolutely fantastic. The depth of knowledge the instructors had and their teachings styles...

Kudos to Joe for doing a great job program managing the development and rule collection for the BPA ASP.NET tool.  We’re calling all ASP.NET users to try it out, but most importantly, to send us suggestions for future rules. You can find more details...

On Friday, we released our first set of Power Toys for Visual Studio!  I have to say that I have a new profound respect for UE (documentation writers) and Release PMs (those PMs who drive the release of the project), as I’ve had to play both roles...

It’s been an intense couple of days, meeting with those who run online communities in business environments (read: for-profits, not non-profits).  In other words, people there either ran an online community, like a support forum (Apple’s support...

The thing I love most about my job is being creative in how I’m trying to get an idea or message across, especially when it comes down to challenging the Microsoft culture.   So, it’s probably a safe bet that no one has ever seen a sign like...

James Lau is a Program Manager for the VS SDK.  He describes the near future of community projects and activities for the VS SDK , including Shared Source and Power Toys (my new 4 favorite words). Check out his post and leave him some feedback. ...

Update:  I’ve attached the OPML file (see bottom of this post) used to create the MSDN RSS feed, in case you’re having issues with the RSS feed on the power toy landing page. Over the past week, we’ve made some changes to the way we interact with...

To all the developers out there who love power toys, I could use your help on this one.  If I were to call our power toys collection “Power Toys for Visual Studio”, what sort of tools come to mind?  Do you think of a. tools that assist in debugging...

My video went live today.  You can find it here at http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/06/29/2666.aspx Let me know your thoughts. (Pls note that i’m currently out of office attending my 10 year high school reunion in Waveland, MS – Katrina Ground...

I’m attending OSCON 2006 in Portland on Monday July 24 – Thursday July 27.  I’m heading out Thursday afternoon to speak at BlogHer . Feel free to contact me if you want to meet, do lunch, or something.  I will also hang out with the Port25 guys...

Many of you power toy users out there have already visited our power toy forums .  We created this forum to discuss current and future power toys.  This forum has supported both the needs of our community and our internal processes very well...

Check out Korby’s Interview on CodePlex on Port25 , a variation of a Channel 9-style website to hold discussions regarding Open Source and how it relates to Microsoft.  The transcript hasn’t been posted yet, so here’s a (rough) breakdown of the discussion...

The Port 25 team filmed me giving my Developer Solutions (power toys) team a presentation on all that i learned from OSCON.  Check out the video (yeah, it is a little long, but it is also available as a podcast / mp3 format.  it’s mostly audio...

This would be a good time to recap how i am 3 for 3 getting injured whenever I leave Redmond to do something Microsoft-related Go to Miss State as a returning-alumni visiting speaker:  torn shoulder blade from running through SeaTac airport trying...

Today we released our first three power toys as Shared Source, collaborative-development projects.  You can find them at their new home at http://www.codeplex.com .  For more info about CodePlex, I’ll refer to Jim’s blog , Over 13 months ago...

I’m heading back to Ohio next week for another CodeMash. My write-up from last year says it all. And yes, I found my friend Rob again by writing a hand-written letter. I can’t recall the last time I wrote a letter to anyone. I’m looking forward to chatting...

On our one-year anniversary of our power toys release, I gave a Microsoft Engineering Excellence Talk on the lessons we learned the hard way “going open,” to motivate other teams to explore all the way they can embrace their communities, including sharing...

MichaelF from the Port 25 team had a great idea to have me do a follow-up podcast with James Howison, the speaker from OSCON 06 that i learned a tremendous amount from about OSS Communities, and apparently, how to build cathedrals, since that’s what my...

Those who have been following my blog since my days on the VSCore team probably have noticed that I haven’t blogged much about my new job here on the Developer Solutions / Power Toys team.  The golden rule of blogging has always been to blog smart...

As I prep for my EE talk , I find myself wondering what I would have done differently a year ago.  Looking at the huge success of the Ajax Control Toolkit, I wonder if I should have had one “Power Toys for Visual Studio” project on CodePlex, where...

Last week, I spoke at the Engineering Excellence / Trustworthy Computing Forum to Microsoft employees at the Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen about CodePlex. I also attempted to do 101 Visual Studio Tips in 50 minutes, but only got through 85 tips...

Over on the CodePlex blog , I just posted the stats for the year in review. Here’s a sneak peek: Site Traffic 2008 2007 % increase from 2007 Visits 19,493,502 8,891,178 +119% User Hours 2,804,898 1,237,356 +127% Unique Visitors 9,811,365 4,532,440 +116...