Professionally Sara’s the CodePlex evangelist, a program manager at Microsoft who is responsible for the feature development and scheduling for codeplex.com, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. She’s been a blogger for over 5 years now and for the past 16 months she’s been running a Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day series.

Knowing how to get the most out of the tools which you use in your daily work is a sure way of increasing your over all productivity. The goal of Sara’s blog is to help you get the most out of Visual Studio by sharing an endless stream of Tips & Tricks on how to perform the daily tasks in a more efficient way.

Do you, for example, know the keyboard shortcut for bringing up the Quick Watch window? Or d0 you know how to disable the “Script Debugging Disabled” warning message that you get in VS2008 when you try to debug JavaScript and script debugging is disabled in IE? Or perhaps you’ve had a need to edit your project file and couldn’t figure out how to do it from inside of Visual Studio?

This is the sort of stuff Sara teaches you to do in her blog! By the way the answers can be fund here, here and here (in the order of the questions asked above).

Sara’s also the author of the book Microsoft Visual Studio Tips – 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity, the paper version of here blog. She generously donates all the proceeds from the book to a scholarship fund to send people from her hometown to collage, with Microsoft marching the donation!

What got you into blogging?

Back in 2003, I was driving the effort to make Visual Studio accessible to developers who are blind or have low vision. My manager at the time suggested starting a blog to share some of my accessibility knowledge. My first post was on how to do accessibility testing, which was well received. So, that was all it really took, and I was hooked. I was blogger #300ish on what would later become blogs.msdn.com.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

Being able to share what I’m learning internally at Microsoft with the outside world. Blogging is very an effective tool for sharing knowledge. Also, I’m a very outgoing, talkative introvert, so blogging allows me to talk to my heart’s content without that “draining” feeling afterwards. =)

What profile do you try and give your blog?

Absolutely no politics or religion. My mom is Catholic, and my dad is Jewish and served on my hometown’s city council for most of my childhood. I figured if that policy worked for me growing up, it’ll work for me now. But beyond that, anything is fair game, provided there’s something that readers could benefit from it.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

There’s always the question in my head of “Should I blog this?” The question is just a part of the way I work, just like responding to email or using a mouse. It’s become second nature for me to question whether there’s a benefit to sharing this information with others.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

Personally, I think the best thing that blogging has done is given the developer community a voice to express their thoughts and feelings about Microsoft products, especially when changes are made based on that feedback.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

This question makes me wonder how many people nowadays check whether the software company has a blog when making a purchasing decision. Of course, there are numerous factors that go into deciding whether to make a purchase. But in my opinion, an active blog that is taking into account customer feedback would indicate to me a company that values its customers’ satisfaction.

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

No. I think employers should support their developers if they choose to blog and maybe even ask their developers to consider it, but “encouraging” might be taking it a single step too far. Blogging isn’t for everyone, and not everyone will be comfortable doing it. And that’s totally cool. To me, encouraging means to gently push someone in a direction that you know they will benefit from, like trying a new cuisine or studying hard for an exam. Since not everyone benefits from the same activities in the same manner, it’s best for employers to support blogging activities, and encourage their bloggers to keep going.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Given the rise of twitter and facebook, it will be interesting to see what happens to the amount of personal content on blogs. Maybe blogs will turn into purely How To or Do It Yourself content, like a virtual notebook that anyone is able to read, and sites like facebook become the person’s primary portal for all information, including personal info. To me at least, this is what seems to be happening with my blog. But then again, writing a daily series on your blog for 16 months makes you want to blog as little as possible outside of it. =)

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

There are way too many to share! But obviously there’s the scholarship fund. Then there was the time I blogged about what the conditions were like in my hometown immediately following Hurricane Katrina, which people still to this day thank me for doing, as (little did I know) it was their only source of info about the area. But getting back to a more developer focus, there’s the Tip of the Day which now no one should ever have to wonder “hmm, I can’t figure out what this option is supposed to do?” I could go on for hours, but fortunately it is past my bedtime.

And there you have it folk, Sara’s take on blogging! Thank you for sharing your thoughts on blogging with me. If you like Sara’s blog then why not buy a copy of her book and give it someone for Christmas? I hope Santa brings me a copy :)

Make sure to stop by her blog for a great Visual Studio Tips & Tricks resource!

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here.