Andrew Brust
Progressive Systems Consulting
Andrew Brust is President of Progressive Systems Consulting, Inc., a Manhattan-based company specializing in the development of, and developer training in, custom applications using .NET, SQL Server, and other Microsoft technologies. Andrew is Microsoft's Regional Director for New York and New Jersey, a member of the INETA Speaker's Bureau, a contributing editor to Visual Studio Magazine and a regular, highly rated speaker at VSLive! and other conferences throughout the U.S. and internationally. He has over 15 years of experience programming and consulting in the Financial, Public, Small Business, and Not-For-Profit sectors. Andrew is a Vice-Chairman of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) Board. Reach him by e-mail at abrust@progsys.com, or visit Progressive's Web site at www.progsys.com.

Chris Kinsman
Vergent Software
Chris Kinsman is one of the founders of Guided Design and is formerly the VP of Technology for a family of Web sites that provide information for developers. Chris teaches course on ASP.NET in both VB .NET and C# and has extensive experience with ASP, Web Farms, Clustering, Data Access, and Scalability. He just finished writing Visual Basic .NET Developer’s Guide to ASP.NET, ADO .NET and XML and C# Developer’s Guide to ASP.NET, ADO .NET and XML. Chris has spoken at a variety of conference including VSLive! and Microsoft TechEd on topics including ASP.NET Security, ASP.NET State Management, Web Service Security, ASP to ASP.NET Migration, Building Server Controls. However, most of his time is spent doing consulting with Vergent Software. Contact him at ckinsman@vergentsoftware.com.

Keith Pleas
Guided Design
Keith is one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and is the Editorial Chair for VBITS. He is also a contributing editor to Visual Studio Magazine and has developed Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith also sits on the INETA board and is the liaison for the INETA Speakers Bureau. You can contact him at keithp@guideddesign.com.

Richard Hale Shaw
Richard Hale Shaw Group
Richard Hale Shaw is the founder of the Richard Hale Shaw Group, which has consulted and trained software developers since 1993. He's created and chaired numerous technical conferences, including C# Live!, part of the VSLive! conference series. An articulate writer and speaker on topics dear to the hearts of software developers and an outspoken critic of broken devtools, Richard specializes in consulting and training on .NET programming in C# and COM/+ programming in C++. You can reach him at www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com.

Conference Speakers

Tom Barnaby, Intertech
Tom Barnaby is an instructor and architect at Intertech, an enterprise developer training firm. He is the author of several Apress books including Distributed .NET Programming in C#, Distributed .NET Programming in VB .NET, and a co-author of a forthcoming book titled .NET Attributes. With Intertech, Tom has developed courses on Visual Basic .NET, C#, and distributed .NET programming and delivered training for organizations such as Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Microsoft.

Peter Blackburn, Boost Data Limited
Peter Blackburn has been connected as a peripheral coding device since the age of 11. He was educated in Computer Science at Cambridge University in England. Peter’s experience in client server databases is extensive; prior to SQL Server 6.5 Peter designed and built his own client server database systems from the ground upwards. Nowadays Peter operates an IT consultancy Boost Data Limited, and co-authors with Bill Vaughn – their last book was ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers. Presently Peter and Bill are working on 3 books: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server CE 2.0, and Hicthhiker’s Guide to SQL Server (Yukon) and Visual Studio (Whidbey) 7th Edition.

Andy Catlin, Ottawa Interactive
Andy Catlin is a principal of Ottawa Interactive Reporting in Western Michigan. He has worked with his customers to help them tackle their thorniest OLAP challenges. Andy helped Microsoft to develop its OLAP curriculum and has taught OLAP to over one thousand developers from all over the world.

Bill Evjen, Reuters
Bill Evjen, a Technical Director for Reuters, is not only the President of the St. Louis .NET User Group (www.stlnet.org) but is also the Founder and Executive Director of the International .NET Association, also known as INETA (www.ineta.org), which represents more than 95,000 members worldwide. He is an acclaimed author and speaker on ASP.NET and XML Web services. Bill has written such books as the Visual Basic .NET Bible, XML Web Services for ASP.NET, Web Services Enhancements: Understanding the WSE for .NET Enterprise Applications, and ASP.NET Professional Secrets.

Stephen Forte, Corzen, Inc
Stephen Forte is the CTO and co-founder of Corzen, Inc , a provider of online market research data. Stephen, the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region, speaks regularly at industry conferences internationally, has written several books on database development, and is currently writing a MS Press book on SQL Server "Yukon". Prior to Corzen, he was the CTO of Zagat Survey as well as was co-founder and CTO of The Aurora Development Group.

Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
Ken Getz is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies and splits his time between programming, writing, and training. Ken has written many technical books, including ASP.NET Developer's Jumpstart with Paul D. Sheriff, and is co-author of several best selling books, including the Access 2002 Developer's Handbooks and VBA Developer's Handbook. He co-wrote and recorded for video training several courses for Application Developer's Training Company (AppDev), including ADO.NET, VB .NET, ASP.NET, Access 2000 and 97, and VB6 seminars. You can reach Ken at keng@mcwtech.com, www.mcwtech.com, or at www.developershandbook.com.

Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems, Ltd
Jackie Goldstein is the principal of Renaissance Computer Systems, training, and development with Microsoft tools and technologies. He has almost 20 years experience developing and managing software applications in the U.S. and Israel, and is experienced at helping companies understand and utilize new technologies. Jackie is the MSDN Regional Director for Israel, the founder of the Israel VB User Group, and is a featured speaker at international developer events including VSLive!, TechEd, VBITS, Microsoft Developer Days, and SQL2TheMax. Jackie also works closely with Microsoft both in Israel and in the U.S. and was recognized by Microsoft as the "Microsoft Regional Director of the Year." He is a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau and was the lead co-author for a book on database programming with .NET ("Database Access with Visual Basic.NET", Addison-Wesley , ISBN 0-67232-3435). In December 2003, Microsoft designated Jackie as a Software Legend !

Scott Hanselman, Corillian Corporation
Scott Hanselman, the Chief Architect at the Corillian Corporation, is an eFinance enabler with over a decade of experience developing software in C, C++, VB, COM, and recently in VB.NET and C#. Scott has been appointed the MSDN Regional Director for Portland, OR for the last three years, developing content for, and speaking at Developer Days and the Visual Studio.NET Launch in both Portland and Seattle. Scott has spoken in numerous conferences and was in the top 5% of audience-rated speakers at TechEd 2003 in Dallas. Scott co-authored two books from Wrox Press and participates in a number of Working Groups with the Web Service Interoperability Organization (WS-I).

Pat Helland, Microsoft
Pat Helland is an Architect in the .NET Enterprise Architecture Team and is helping to define Microsoft’s strategy for service oriented architecture. He has spent more than 25 years working in the area of database, transaction processing, application programming models, distributed computing, and fault tolerant computing. Pat started at Microsoft in 1994 and was a cofounder of the team that designed and implemented MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server) which is now called COM+. He has spent a lot of time in recent years working on loosely-coupled application models and reliable messaging. Prior to working at Microsoft, Pat spent most of the 1980s at Tandem Computers where he was chief architect and senior implementer of TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility) which provided the transaction processing functionality for Tandem’s NonStop System.

Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters
Billy Hollis is an author and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee. Billy is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic .NET, VB .NET Programming on the Public Beta. He has written many articles, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. He is the Regional Director of Developer Relations in Nashville for Microsoft, and runs a consulting company focusing on Microsoft .NET.

Josh Holmes
Josh Holmes has been a software developer and trainer for 8 years, and provides training and mentoring services to software developers in the areas of XML, C++, VB, Enterprise Application Design and Windows DNA. He's done extensive work with XML in both Internet and Client-Server applications. Among his recent development projects, he wrote an XML/COM-based client architecture for a user-driven and configurable UI: each of the components available to client was read in from an XML stream and used to generate a UI and menus based on the client’s requests and login ID. He also wrote an XML-based reporting system that delivered reports to hybrid clients.

Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
Ron Jacobs is a Product Manager for Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices group (http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices). Ron’s primary area of focus is Enterprise scale distributed application development. He brings over 15 years of development experience to his new role of capturing, proving and documenting the best practices of enterprise scale development.

Leon Katsnelson, IBM Toronto Laboratory
Leon Katsnelson is a Senior Development Manager in the DB2 development team at the IBM Toronto Laboratory. Leon has over 18 years of software development experience. He spent the last 10 years working in DB2 development. His areas of expertise are application development and integration with mainframe and midrange data. Leon is an author and frequent speaker at conferences and other industry events.

Alex Keh, Oracle
Alex Keh is a Windows data access senior product manager at Oracle. He focuses on all aspects of .NET development with the Oracle database, including the Oracle Data Provider for .NET and Visual Studio integration. Alex has presented on Oracle's integration with .NET at several industry events. He has worked previously at both Microsoft and IBM on Windows database tools development.

Don Kiely
Don Kiely, MVP, MCSD, is a senior technology consultant, building custom applications as well as providing business and technology consulting services. His development work involves tools such as SQL Server, Visual Basic, C#, ASP.NET, and Microsoft Office. He writes regularly for several trade journals, and trains developers in database and .NET technologies. You can reach Don at donkiely@computer.org.

Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
Deborah Kurata is a consultant and co-founder of InStep Technologies, a consulting group that designs and develops object-oriented and component-based Windows applications. Deborah is the author of Doing Objects in Visual Basic 6 for SAMS, which focuses on a pragmatic approach to object-oriented design and development of VB applications. You can reach Deborah at deborahk@insteptech.com.

Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Rockford Lhotka is the author of Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects from Apress. He is a contributing author for Visual Studio Magazine and he speaks at major conferences around the world. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies, one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners.

Juval Lowy, IDesign
Juval Lowy is a software architect and the principal of IDesign (www.idesign.net). He is a Microsoft Regional Director for the Silicon Valley, working with Microsoft on helping the industry adopt .NET. His latest book, Programming .NET Components by O'Reilly, is dedicated to component-oriented programming and design. Juval participates in the Microsoft internal design reviews for future versions of .NET, publishes numerous articles regarding almost every aspect of .NET development, and is a frequent presenter at development conferences. Microsoft recognized Juval as a Software Legend.

Olga Londer, QA
Olga Londer MVP/MCSE/MCT is a principal technologist at QA, the UK’s leading independent IT training company, where her responsibilities include teaching, consulting and technical leadership for the Internet curriculum—she has authored most of the company's Web development courses. Olga is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, and has been involved with Web development and infrastructure since 1992. As a consultant, Olga has been a technical lead for numerous projects for blue-chip clients. She is a frequent speaker at the conferences and is an author of Content Management Server 2002: A Complete Guide.

Chris Mullins, Kiefer Consulting, Inc.
Chris Mullins is a .NET Enterprise Application Architect for Kiefer Consulting, Inc, a founding partner in Winfessor, Inc and a recognized expert in standards based Instant Messaging. Chris has built numerous Enterprise applications with millions of users and high performance expectations. Chris has over 12 years building applications that incorporate industry best practices, and has been developing Enterprise applications for the .NET framework since the beta releases.

Jimmy Nilsson, JNSK AB
Jimmy Nilsson is the owner of the Swedish consulting company JNSK AB. He has been working with system development for more than fifteen years. Jimmy has written numerous technical articles and is the author of .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000.

Brian Randell, MCW Technologies
Brian A. Randell teaches Microsoft .NET curriculum using Visual Basic .NET and C# for DevelopMentor. When not teaching, Brian works as a Senior Consultant with MCW Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Partner, specializing in custom application development with Microsoft .NET, SQL Server, and the Microsoft Office family of products. Contact him at brianr@develop.com.

Jon Rauschenberger, Clarity Consulting
Jon Rauschenberger is a partner and the Director of Technology at Clarity, a Chicago-based information technology consulting firm and Microsoft Solution Provider. Jon is a frequent conference speaker and author, and as a member of Microsoft's Strategic Design Review committee, helps the Microsoft Visual Studio and platform groups formulate their products' future.

Thomas Rizzo, Microsoft
Tom Rizzo is a director in the SQL Server group at Microsoft. Before working in SQL Server, Tom worked in a number of Microsoft’s other server businesses including BizTalk Server and Exchange Server. Tom is also the author of the popular MSPress Series Programming Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, currently in its 3rd Edition. You can reach Tom either via email at thomriz@microsoft.com or via his blog at http://www.sqljunkies.com/weblog/Tom%20Rizzo/.

Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc
Paul D. Sheriff is a recognized leader in the Visual Basic industry and the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California. Paul is a frequent speaker at Microsoft Developer Days, Microsoft Tech Ed, Microsoft "MSDN Presents", industry conferences and user groups across the country. You can see Paul teaching .NET on Microsoft WebCasts and with Blast Through Learning videos (www.blastthroughlearning.com). Check out Paul's new book ASP.NET Developer's Jumpstart with co-author Ken Getz.

Sanjay Shetty, Wireless Strategist & Consultants (I) Pvt. Ltd
Sanjay Shetty is currently the founder, CEO of Wireless Strategist, an organization consulting software companies on Microsoft Technologies. Sanjay has been a regular speaker at various industry forums across India on topics ranging from development, design, Internet enabling of business, to wireless strategies. He has been speaking at various Microsoft conferences and others such as India Internet World, at the IIT and various educational institutes. He is one of the founders of the Mumbai Microsoft User Group and is the Regional Manager for the International .NET Association for Asia Pacific. In this role, he is responsible for growing user groups across the country. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director for the Western Region in India, a third party advocate used by Microsoft as a technology expert.

Kimberly Tripp, SYSolutions, Inc.
Since 1995, Kimberly has worked as a speaker, writer, trainer and consultant for her own company, SYSolutions, Inc. and in 2002 joined 6 other SQL Server specialists to form Solid Quality Learning, a high-end training and consulting firm with more than 100 years of combined database expertise. Kimberly was a technical contributor for the SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit and recently co-authored the MSPress title SQL Server 2000 High Availability. Additionally, Kimberly works closely with Microsoft to provide new and interesting technical resources including the SQL Server 2000 High Availability Overview DVD—featuring more than 9 hours of in-depth technical content, demos and peer chats with MVPs. Currently, Kimberly is working to help create Yukon content including labs and whitepapers. www.sqlskills.com

Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corporation
William (Bill) Vaughn is President of Beta V Corporation. He's developed for, taught, and written about mainframe and personal computers since '72, including 14 years at Microsoft. He's the author of the best-selling books ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for VB Programmers—Second Edition and ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers. While at Microsoft, Bill taught and wrote courses at Microsoft University, wrote data access documentation for Visual Basic (versions 2-5), was the Enterprise Product Manger for Visual Studio, and spent his last two years training Microsoft developers.

Andy Wigley, Content Masters, Ltd
Andy Wigley is a Principal Technologist at the U.K. technical authoring company Content Master, focusing on mobile technologies. Andy is an expert in the use of the Microsoft .NET Framework in mobile solutions. He is the co-author of Building .NET Applications for Mobile Devices, and is lead author of the .NET Compact Framework Developer’s Reference.

Shawn Wildermuth, ADOGuy.com
Shawn Wildermuth is a Microsoft .NET MVP, an INETA speaker, a speaker at
several national conferences, the editor of ONDotnet.com, the author of
" Pragmatic ADO.NET" for Addison-Wesley and an author of numerous articles
for a variety of magazines. He is also the founder of ADOGuy.com and has
been building data-driven software for more than eighteen years. Shawn has
spent most of those years developing database applications in the varied
fields of accounting, real estate, Internet, and medicine.