Don Box is a distinguished engineer in the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) at Microsoft Corp., where he works on platform technology to enable the next generation of entertainment experiences. Before joining IEB, Box led the development team that produced Open Data Protocol, Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, the “M” language and the SQL developer experience for Microsoft Visual Studio. Box also was an early contributor to the Managed Extensibility Framework, the second-generation Extensible Application Markup Language and Windows Workflow Foundation implementations.

Don joined Microsoft in 2002 as an architect of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), where he worked on software to enable programs to safely and securely interoperate with one another. Don’s responsibilities included both the design and architecture of the runtime stack, as well as interoperability protocols with IBM and other partners.

Before joining Microsoft, Don was an independent consultant focused on software integration technologies. Don was the leading external voice for Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and helped shape the way developers across the globe experience those technologies. In 1996, Don worked as a consultant to Software AG and Microsoft on the UNIX-based Distributed COM project; that work gave Don the desire to move away from shared-runtime distributed architectures and embrace data-centric message passing using XML. To that end, Don worked with Microsoft and Dave Winer to create the original SOAP specification in 1998.

Don is a respected writer on software development topics, serving as a series editor at Addison Wesley and as a contributing editor to C++ Report, Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ), and MSDN Magazine. Don’s first book, Essential COM, remains a part of the C++ developer’s canon. Don was the first blogger to publish RSS from a Microsoft web property (http://www.gotdotnet.com/) and now (sporadically) maintains a blog at http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/.   Don has a Master’s degree in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from C.S.U. Long Beach.