Tom Button left Microsoft in 2007 after 19 years with the company. In his last role as corporate vice president, Platform Technology & Strategy, Tom Button drove construction of Microsoft’s long-term technical innovation plans and supporting opportunity map. For most of his career with Microsoft, Button served in the Developer Tools Division, where he was most recently corporate vice president responsible for product management, evangelism and business development for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, while also leading development for Microsoft’s startup effort in the enterprise tools space (launched as Visual Studio Team System). Button also managed development for the first version of Visual Studio .NET and other programming and scripting technologies including Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript and Microsoft Office Developer Edition. Button got his start with Microsoft in 1988 as program manager for QuickBasic and the Basic Compiler before being tapped to lead product management for Visual Basic 1.0. He spent the next eight years leading the Visual Basic business and growing Microsoft’s developer tools franchise, including planning and launching the first versions of Visual Basic, Visual Studio and Microsoft Developer Network products and programs. Button also managed several other developer products and programs, including Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the Mastering Series of developer courseware products and several versions of Visual C++, Visual J++ and Visual FoxPro. Button grew up in New York, where he discovered his passion for technology at CEW Electronics, a small custom electronics shop where he designed and built custom electronic control panels for industrial applications. He graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. While in college, Button played football, worked for IBM writing code to analyze processor performance, and consulted as a software engineer. After college, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group as an associate consultant before leaving to join Microsoft. Button lives in the Seattle area with his wife and six children, and enjoys coaching Little League baseball, softball and soccer. | 
