RE: CSUN report on Visual Studio 2010

  • From: "Ken Perry" <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:38:59 -0400

Hard to believe my original fruit basket idea has got all the way to a CSUN
demonstration.  Of course I stole the idea from a Borland demonstration even
though it wasn't called a fruit basket when Borland demonstrated it.  Ah the
fun.

Ken
  

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jamal Mazrui
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2011 8:06 PM
To: jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; programmingblind; Program-l
Subject: CSUN report on Visual Studio 2010

I attended a Freedom Scientific session on JAWS with Visual Studio 2010. 
  To the best of my understanding, the points below are true.  However, 
I may have inadvertently misunderstood aspects.  If anyone has other 
info, please share.

FS is in the process of transitioning to VS 2010 internally for its 
development of JAWS and other applications.  Partly because the 
development team includes blind indivisuals who rely on JAWS for access, 
the company has decided to make internal improvements to JAWS so that it 
better supports User Interface Automation (UIA, the successor to MSAA) 
and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) controls, upon which the VS 
2010 IDE is based.  In addition, there will be a set of factory-supplied 
scripts for VS 2010.  It is currently expected to be released as part of 
a JAWS 12 update in about a month.

Some of that script set will be open source so that blind programmers 
can hack on it and improve VS 2010 support by JAWS.  Other parts will be 
closed source.  Documentation for the new UIA and WPF aspects of the 
JAWS scripting language will not be provided until at least JAWS 13.  At 
that time, there may also be home row mode support for UIA (in addition 
to the present support for MSAA).

Only commercial versions of VS 2010 will be officially supported.  This 
is because the scripts use a combination of UIA and the VS COM object 
model, which the free, Express versions of VS 2010 do not support.  FS 
says use of the object model was necessary because of nonstandard or 
broken aspects of the UIA implementation in VS 2010 by Microsoft.  Users 
of Express editions of VS 2010 may experience partial benefit from the 
scripts, but it will be hit and miss, so that is not supported.

The CSUN session demoed the scripts that are under development, 
apparently in late beta.  The IntelliSense support has clearly been a 
major focus of the scripts, as well as solid access in the code editor, 
e.g., recognizing break points and bookmarks in source code.

In the demo, Glenn Gordon built a fruit basket program, primarily using 
the editor for the XAML markup language for user interfaces -- an a VS 
editing environment that I think works for editing any XML documents. 
JAWS would speak suggestions about almost every aspect of creating 
controls by typing XML modes and attribute data into a .xaml file. 
Also, VS could easily be made to jump into a related C# or VB.NET 
editing mode related to the current XML node that had focus in the XML 
editor.  He wrote the event handling code in C# using its editor.  This 
handled the Add and Delete actions of the fruit basket dialog.

In short, FS is apparently making the most sighnificant commitment to 
supporting VS than any screen reader developer company has done in 
recent years.  Let us hope that the CSUN preview does, indeed, come to 
fruition soon.  Let us also hope that other screen reader developers and 
scripters are motivated to compete in this area so that blind 
programmers have good choices.

Jamal
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