I am a Principal Program Manager for Collaboration Services in Azure. I have worked at Microsoft since 1994. I originally joined the Microsoft Word 6.0 support team and quickly learned WordBasic, then VBA, then VB3.0 and so on and so forth. Programming, you might say, has always been “in my blood.” When I was 11 years old, my father brought home a Texas Instruments TI99/4a. He (being a programmer himself) taught me a little BASIC and the rest they say is history. I have since learned to program in many different languages: Pascal, PowerBuilder, Paradox, ObjectPAL, COBOL, JAVA, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, C, C++, and C# (which is my favorite, by the way). I owe a lot to my father’s decision. In a lot of ways, it got me to where I am today.

I have moved around a lot within Microsoft over the years. But I have always been in a role associated with Microsoft Office or Collaboration Technologies. From the hectic elementary levels of support to a content manager for the knowledge base, a head down debug mad escalation engineer to an enthusiastic beta tester and was even a lead software engineer. Now I am in charge of collaboration experiences in the Microsoft Azure Fabric as I move customers from on-prem solutions towards Azure and Office 365. Office Development is still a passion of mine as I lead an internal World-wide Community of Office developers at Microsoft.

As part of my efforts, I helped develop and release several tools that have been published to the web:

• Microsoft Office 2010 Code Compatibility Inspector
• Microsoft Office 2010 Environment Assessment Tool
• Microsoft Office Labs Speed Launch – no longer posted on OfficeLabs, but you can find a few articles about it here and here and a summary page here (with other OfficeLabs tools).
• The PowerPoint Export to CD Wizard (no longer available, but it is now a built-in part of PowerPoint)
• Office OpenXML File Viewer
• Office Web Add-in Side Loader
• Excel File Cleaner
• The Microsoft Office Development Environment Setup (MODES)
• easyEWS for Outlook Office.js Development
• 5entences Web Add-in for Outlook
• Trello Taskpane for Word
• And more recently several Trello Power-ups:
  • Card Badge Age
  • Card Priority Badge

For more information, check out my profile on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Twitter (@davacra).

LICENSE

For all code posted on my site, I license it under the GNU All-Permissive License:

GNU All-Permissive:

Copying and distribution of this code, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.  This code is offered as-is, without any warranty.