Amanda Silver

I'm Amanda Silver - the Director of Program Management for Tools for Client Applications in Visual Studio. I've been at Microsoft since 2001 after graduating from Brown University. Starting with a focus on compilers, I was one of the primary designers for the Visual Basic .NET language from 2001 – 2008. I was one of the key inventors on the LINQ project (Language INtegrated Query) which incorporates SQL-style query expressions and XML as a first-class data type into Visual Basic .NET & C#. I then worked on Visual Studio Tools for Applications, VBA, and a long lead project for Office development that eventually became Office Web Extensions. After that, I worked on Chakra, the JavaScript engine that Internet Explorer runs on. That work encompassed everything from maintaining competitive browser performance to engagement with the ECMAScript standards body to evolving tooling support for JavaScript in Visual Studio. My team then launched TypeScript which adds type annotations for application-scale JavaScript development. I now lead the team that works on tools for building client applications spanning Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Internet Explorer, cross-platform mobile tools like Apache Cordova. Unleashing the creativity of developers is my unrelenting passion.