Amanda Silver has been working on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for nearly 7 years. Starting on working to improve COM interoperability and calls from .NET to the native Win32 APIs, she then moved into the language design for the Visual Basic language. For the 2008 product cycle, she was the Lead Program Manager for the Visual Basic core experience which included the language design, compiler, editor, debugger, and interoperability with VB6. The past several years have been devoted to enhancing data integration in the form the LINQ project (Language INtegrated Query) which incorporates SQL-style query expressions and XML as a first-class data type into the Visual Basic language.