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**Amanda Silver:** We're a lot better. |
**Jerod Santo:** We're getting there. |
**Amanda Silver:** But a lot of the challenges were really about encapsulation and modularity, and how do you create modules. And so that's where TypeScript came from. And that's when we -- TypeScript was really our first open source project that we did fully open source from the get-go. And I remember in that era it t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The muckety-mucks... |
**Jerod Santo:** How did you finally convince them? What was the winning argument? |
**Amanda Silver:** I think the argument was... So our objective at the time was to make sure that our internal developers didn't end up on a different path than the broad open source ecosystem that was benefiting from the evolution of JavaScript. We had decades of experience at that point of building our own C++ compil... |
\[12:01\] But then secondly, we also thought that if that was going to be the case, if we wanted to create something where we call it "first party equals third party", meaning that our developers internal to Microsoft use the same tools that our third party developers use, our external developers use. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Amanda Silver:** If we wanted to accomplish that, then we had to build something that the JavaScript community would actually use and like. And at that time, there was still a fair amount of hostility towards Microsoft in that community. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Amanda Silver:** And so we absolutely had to launch it as open source, to be able to introduce TypeScript to the world and start to get traction. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** From the inside, describe the hostility. |
**Amanda Silver:** The hostility from the community? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Enumerate over how hostility shows up and manifests... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, how do you see it? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...from the developer community at that time. |
**Amanda Silver:** Well, I mean, there's many different forms. There's some folks who would never even consider anything from Microsoft, because there's just some kind of halo effect of history, or something like that, that they would refuse to use anything from Microsoft in their stack, period. And that they won't eve... |
Then there's kind of like the indifference, or treating Microsoft products as though they are irrelevant... And they just, again, wouldn't use it or consider it because Microsoft couldn't come up with it. It's kind of a disbelief, right? Microsoft couldn't come up with anything useful. And then there's the more kind of... |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. I think in the past that was a lot clearer lines to draw, because you kind of couldn't live entirely in Microsoft's world, or live entirely in the open source or Unix-y world... And now it's just much more of one world, where it's like -- even if you are skeptical of Microsoft, try not to use som... |
**Amanda Silver:** Well, that was the next thing that happened after TypeScript. We started to get a little bit of traction with TypeScript. And actually, there was a fantastic partnership that we had built with the Google Angular team at the time, that actually kind of got TypeScript... You know, in some senses, no pr... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[16:15\] And then VS Code kicked the door open. \[laughter\] Am I right? |
**Amanda Silver:** And then we introduced VS Code. And I think that, in a lot of senses, TypeScript and VS Code actually went really hand-in-hand... Because part of what TypeScript was doing was creating static types over JavaScript. And the tooling for JavaScript wasn't particularly good at the time, because it was ve... |
And so the hypothesis was that if we created a great developer experience for TypeScript and JavaScript in VS Code, that every developer that's a web developer, it doesn't matter what you do on the backend, everyone has to do a little bit of JavaScript. And so if we created a great developer experience for JavaScript, ... |
**Jerod Santo:** In retrospect, it's kind of a master stroke. I'm not sure if you masterminded this, or Satya did, or somebody else... Or if it just happened kind of organically over time, as things tend to do... Where it's like these dominoes just lined up, and really did change the brand and the developer relationshi... |
**Amanda Silver:** Well, I mean, I will say, certainly while I was present and helping and involved in shaping the strategy -- I definitely cannot take credit for the overall direction, and whether it was Anders Heilsberg helping shepherd TypeScript to come to the fore, or Erich Gamma and team kind of building VS Code.... |
**Break**: \[18:36\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So now you have VS Code, and TypeScript, and GitHub... |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. Well, that was a little bit later. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, a little bit later. Maybe I'm jumping ahead. But I'm trying to get to present day, because here we are, at Build 2025... |
**Amanda Silver:** That's right. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was counting the mentions of "agentic" in the keynote this morning, because I'm a nerd like that, and I got to 187. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I even left off things like "model", or "MCP", or... I left Copilot off, which is like... |
**Amanda Silver:** Wow. |
**Jerod Santo:** Because I feel like you're just going to get to a thousand. I can't count that fast. |
**Amanda Silver:** Well, you could always take a transcript, give it to an AI, and it can count it for you. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's true, but I wanted to do it live. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I thought about that, too \[unintelligible 00:22:20.09\] I was like "Yeah, you know... It'll be easier later." |
**Jerod Santo:** I thought about it as well, but you know -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "...on a word calculator." |
**Jerod Santo:** ...we're going to keep the mind going as well... VS Code - I don't to call it a Trojan horse, because it has negative connotations, but it's kind of this thing that you've gotten out there now, as an open source project, and as a product that... I mean, how many millions of people use it, right? You pr... |
**Amanda Silver:** We have 50 million monthly active users. |
**Jerod Santo:** 50 million. |
**Amanda Silver:** Five zero. Across VS Code and Visual Studio together. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, so that's two of them. |
**Amanda Silver:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And which one's bigger? |
**Amanda Silver:** VS Code. |
**Jerod Santo:** VS Code's bigger. |
**Amanda Silver:** Significantly. |
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