Our VS Mac product was an acquisition of a product called Xamarin Studio. The Xamarin team were fully remote, with team members throughout Europe and the US. As a result, the team were always looking for ways to streamline the design-develop-test pipeline. During an organizational hack week, one of the designers on my team partnered up with a VS Mac developer to create FirmaSharp, a tool which exports designs in Figma as code.
The project also included a previewer tool which allows designers to view functional versions of their changes without needing to recompile. Designs created in FigmaSharp also respond to system theme changes. The team used FigmaSharp to develop numerous redesigned screens that shipped with the 2022 update of VS for Mac.
My role on this project was to socialize and evangelize the project with senior leadership within DevDiv and throughout the company, to provide ongoing feedback to the designer, make sure that product management was on board, and get alignment with engineering management so that we wouldn't lose our engineering partner. I also helped drive
open-sourcing the project.
In 2019 the VS for Mac team began work on a complete, bottom-up rewrite of the codebase to improve performance. The goal was to move the product off of GTK, an outdated and sluggish Mac platform, and onto Cocoa. Doing this meant that every view in VS for Mac would need to be rebuilt on the new codebase. Figmasharp significantly sped up development of the most recent version of VS for Mac and allowed us to rebuild 100%
of the views in VS for Mac. As a result of his work on this project, our designer received a promotion.