Bio

Jb is an experienced software professional with an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for developer tools. He joined Microsoft’s Developer Division in 2014, following Microsoft’s acquisition of SyntaxTree, the developer tools company he founded in 2011.

He has a long history with C# and .NET and is the original author of Cecil, an open-source .NET binary manipulation library that has proved useful to many people.

At Microsoft, Jb leads the .NET Gaming effort, helping game developers succeed with C# and .NET. Much of his work with partners is covered by NDAs. He also leads the Unity integrations for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Prior to founding SyntaxTree, Jb fulfilled one of his dreams by joining the Mono team at Novell under Miguel de Icaza, where he worked on various parts of the project. He was part of the five-person team that started the MonoTouch and Mono for Android projects, which later became the foundations of Xamarin. There, he was responsible for the tooling that reduced the size of apps for deployment.

Before Novell, Jb worked at db4objects, a startup developing an open-source object-oriented database for Java and .NET. He worked on the Java database itself, the tooling used to convert its code to .NET, and .NET-specific components such as the LINQ to db4o provider.

Jb’s involvement with Mono, an open-source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, began even earlier. As a student, he was selected for the first two editions of the Google Summer of Code, spending both summers contributing to Mono and flipping bits instead of burgers.