.NET Rocks!

Julia Liuson

As President of Microsoft’s Developer Division (DevDiv), Julia LOOSon leads the technical and business strategy, product development and engineering teams for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, all Microsoft programming languages and runtime (.NET and C#, TypeScript, OpenJDK, C++, Python and more), Azure DevOps, Azure SDKs, and Azure Application Development PaaS and Serverless offerings. She also manages GitHub as an independent operating entity. Liuson has served a variety of leadership roles on product and engineering in the Microsoft Developer business, including leading the effort to make the .NET platform open source and cross platform. She also worked as General Manager for Microsoft Server and Tools Business in Shanghai for two years while running engineering teams on both sides of the Pacific. Liuson oversaw key acquisitions including Xamarin and cultivated deep cross-industry partnerships with VMWare, Redis Inc, F5, Elastic, Confluent, and more. Julia is a pioneer in Microsoft’s journey in embracing the open-source ecosystem and helped reinforce Microsoft’s role as a critical partner. Her OSS achievements at Microsoft extend to TypeScript, VSCode, C#, C++, Python, .NET, Playwright and more. She started the Java effort at Microsoft, first by building the OSS Java extension for VS Code in partnership with RedHat; later on sponsoring OpenJDK effort at Microsoft, and nearly half a million VMs is running on the Microsoft OpenJDK internally. She also sponsored Microsoft joining Rust Foundation as a founding member. Liuson started at Microsoft after graduating in 1992 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington. She received the Asian American Executive of the Year award in 2013 and was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2019.