Patrick Nelson
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Nelson is a Principal Software Engineer with over a decade at Microsoft focused on Visual Studio diagnostic tools, specializing in debuggers, profilers, compilers, and code instrumentation. He led major rewrites such as the C#/VB expression evaluator with the Roslyn team and helped modernize mixed-mode debugging for managed, native, JavaScript, and GPU scenarios. Patrick’s work spans deep runtime-level problems—async task debugging, 64-bit dump analysis of 32-bit processes, and debug engine prototyping—that directly improve developer productivity. Based in Redmond, he combines C++ and C# expertise with a pragmatic product mindset to turn complex diagnostic challenges into usable IDE features. Less obvious is his knack for lightweight prototyping that teams adopt as production engines, reflecting both technical vision and hands-on execution. His primary goal remains making it easier for developers to create great software.
11 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
University of Colorado DenverJCOS
Stackoverflow
3,180reputation
112kreached
14answers
0questions
debugging
top-1%
Github Skills (42)
debugging10
vsix10
debug10
roslyn10
dotnet10
code-analysis10
visual-studio10
compiler10
csharp10
msbuild9
primitive9
collector9
cil9
low-level9
coreclr9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
plnelson/nes
Mar 2016 - Apr 2016
Contributions:56 pushes, 23 branches in 1 month
plnelson/ConcordExtensibilitySamples
Nov 2015 - Jun 2016
Contributions:12 pushes, 8 branches in 7 months
vscodedebugdebuggerextensibilityextensibility-engine
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