Conference Chairs

Keith Pleas, Guided Design
VBITS
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.

Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software
ASP Live!
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.

Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
C# Live!
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.

Andrew Brust, Citigate Hudson
SQL Live!
Andrew Brust is Chief, New Technology at Citigate Hudson, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in New York City. 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 highly rated speaker at 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. He can be reached at andrew.brust@citigatehudson.com.

Steven P. Davis, Walt Disney Studios
Software Architecture Summit
Steven P. Davis is Vice President of IT for the Walt Disney Studios and also serves as co-chair of Disney's Architecture Council. Mr. Davis is a systems architect and technology strategist with more than 25 years of experience in both commercial software and in house application development. He is a frequent speaker and thought leader in Enterprise Architecture. In addition to architectural and development responsibilities, Mr. Davis also oversees Disney’s domestic film distribution, music, and entertainment business services groups within the Studio's IT organization.

Speakers

Scott Allen, OdeToCode
Scott has more than 12 years of experience in delivering commercial products across a wide range of technologies — from 8 bit embedded devices to highly scalable Web applications for Fortune 50 clients. Over the last three years, he has been using .NET and SQL Server technologies to build business intelligence on top of clinical data warehouses.

Goksin Bakir, Yage

Tom Barnaby, Intertech Training
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.

Brent Carlson, LogicLibrary, Inc.
Brent Carlson is Vice President of Technology and co-founder, LogicLibrary, Inc. Recently named to InfoWorld's list of "CTOs to Watch in 2004," he drives the development and delivery of LogicLibrary's products. Brent is a 17-year veteran of IBM, where he served as lead architect for the WebSphere Business Components project and held numerous leadership roles on the "IBM SanFrancisco Project." Carlson recently led LogicLibrary's product development team in porting the Logidex solution to the .NET platform. He is the co-author of two books: SanFrancisco Design Patterns: Blueprints for Business Software (with James Carey and Tim Graser) and Framework Process Patterns: Lessons Learned Developing Application Frameworks (with James Carey). Carlson is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences, including Microsoft PDC 2003, and regional user groups. He is a BEA Regional Director and holds 16 software patents, with eight more currently under evaluation.

Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft
Yaacov Cohen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Mainsoft. After serving as Mainsoft's Chief Technology Officer for almost three years, he became President in 1999. Cohen joined Mainsoft in 1994. As the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, he built Mainsoft's R&D center and led the conception and development of Mainsoft's application-porting platform, Visual MainWin.

Eric Deily, Microsoft
Eric Deily is a Lead Program Manager on the IIS team at Microsoft, and has been on the team since 1999. He worked on IIS6 process model and many of the features contained within such as recycling, routing based on URLs, pinging, etc. Eric now is responsible for supportability, diagnostics, health, instrumentation, and tracing in IIS7.

Sam Gentile, Adesso Systems
Sam Gentile is internationally recognized for his overall .NET knowledge and was recently acknowledged by Microsoft as an MVP for C#/.NET. He is also an INETA Speaker having delivered .NET training to user groups and companies all over the US. Sam is now the Chief .NET Architect at Adesso Systems. In this role, he is responsible for all architectural and design aspects of the future line of .NET based products, working with .NET based technologies, present and future.

Cathi Gero, Prenia Corp.
Cathi Gero, C.P.A., is founder and development director of Prenia Corp., providing custom software applications, training, and architectural designing to businesses and developers. She is a Microsoft C# MVP and is an active member of the .NET community. Cathi has extensive experience developing applications using the .NET Framework, Visual FoxPro, SQL Server, and Crystal Reports as well as other technologies. She is a speaker at national conferences, author of white papers for Microsoft, and technical editor for the book .NET For VFP Developers.

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.

Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft
Brian Goldfarb is a Product Manager on the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft. Over the last few years, Brian has been focused on helping drive the direction and strategy behind Microsoft's latest set of Web development technologies, including ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition. Brian graduated with degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Duke University.

Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
Jackie Goldstein has achieved national and international recognition for expertise in Windows and .NET development in general and Visual Basic and database applications in particular. He is the principal of Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd. , which specializes in consulting, training, and development with Microsoft tools and technologies. He has over 20 years experience developing and managing software applications in the U.S. and Israel, and is known for his ability to help developers understand and take advantage of new technologies

Jack Hakim, EC Wise
Jack Hakim, a national BI speaker and Business Intelligence author, has architected designed and developed numerous analytical, OO, and database applications. He leads EC Wise's Business Intelligence practice, combining requirements analysis, decision support, model building, data cleansing, OLAP, OR, and data mining techniques to enable companies to make better decisions by using data more effectively. 

Gregor Hohpe, ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Gregor Hohpe leads the Enterprise Integration practice at ThoughtWorks, Inc., a specialized provider of application development and integration services. Gregor is a widely recognized thought leader on asynchronous messaging architectures and co-author of the seminal book "Enterprise Integration Patterns" (Addison-Wesley, 2004). Gregor speaks regularly at technical conferences around the world and maintains the Web site www.eaipatterns.com. 

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.

BJ Holtgrewe, Microsoft
BJ Holtgrewe is a lead product manager for Visual Studio. He is responsible for product planning and marketing for Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. BJ came to the developer division after spending almost three years in Microsoft Research working in the Smart Personal Object Technology team creating the MSN Direct network and smart watches. Prior to joining Research he was the Senior Product Manager/Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Business Tools Division working on MapPoint. Before life at Microsoft, he was a project and design consultant and worked for software companies on the East Coast and in Europe. Even earlier in his history BJ was an avid skydiver instructor, internationally rated skydiving judge, and underwater search and recovery diver.

Rob Howard, Telligent Systems
Rob Howard is a founder of Telligent Systems, Inc., which specializes in building high-availability and high-scale software solutions. Prior to founding Telligent, he was employed by the Microsoft where he was a member of the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 team -- specifically contributing to ASP.NET.

Richard Hundhausen, Accentient
Richard Hundhausen travels and teaches Microsoft .NET technologies. As a result of constantly evangelizing .NET over the past several years, he was nominated and has become one of Microsoft's Regional Directors. When not teaching, Richard works as a principal of Accentient, a high-bandwidth software architecture and development firm, specializing in .NET, SQL Server and BizTalk solutions. Richard has co-authored two .NET books for Wiley: Programming ADO.NET and Building Web Applications with ADO.NET and XML Web Services.

Trey Johnson, Encore Development
Trey Johnson is an international data-warehousing speaker and data-warehousing consultant employed by Encore Development, a provider of web-powered business solutions for Fortune 1000 and mid-market organizations. Trey has been delivering technology solutions with Microsoft SQL Server since version 4.x.

Chris Keene, ObjectStore
Christopher Keene is Vice President, Data Caching for ObjectStore. He is responsible for the management and direction of all ObjectStore data caching products and services. Previously, Keene was the CEO and founder of Persistence Software, a leader in data caching and object-relational mapping technology. Keene founded Persistence with the vision of accelerating and simplifying access to corporate data. Keene has appeared as a featured expert on real-time data convergence in numerous publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to InformationWeek; and at conferences ranging from Comdex to Enterprise Architect Summit. Keene has consistently been recognized as a software visionary, securing him a place in the Intelligent Enterprise Top Ten Technology Leaders.

Abdelmalek Kemmou, Arrabeta
Abdelmalek Kemmou (Malek), CEO of Arrabeta, a consulting company based in Casablanca Morocco, is the Microsoft Regional Director for North Africa. He is a senior consultant, a skilled trainer and a leader of the developer community in North Africa. Malek is recognized as an expert on Microsoft technology (certified on most Microsoft products and technologies: MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA, MCAD, MCSA, and 23 MCP certifications), with a strong background on other technologies (J2EE/Java, Perl, C++, Cisco) technologies.

Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
Deborah Kurata is a professional software architect, designer, and developer. She provides consulting services in the areas of project architecture and design, software development (Windows and smart-client applications), and mentoring services. Deborah is frequently brought in to assist existing teams with establishing best practices and defining an appropriate architecture and application framework.

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.

Alexander Krapf , Codemesh
Mr. Krapf, president and co-founder of Codemesh, has over 20 years experience in software engineering, product development, and project management in the United States and Europe. He has been extensively involved in a variety of complex product development efforts using his in-depth understanding of .NET, C++, and Java. Mr. Krapf’s successes have ranged from contributing SEC compliance components in the financial sector to managing the development of e-commerce servers for Hitachi Computer Products. In addition to founding and managing Codemesh, Mr. Krapf has worked for IBM, Thomson Financial Services, Hitachi, Veeder-Root, and Document Directions Inc., where he has been involved in product rollout, customer training, and customer relations for a diverse set of products and services.

Steve Lasker, Microsoft
Steve is program manager at Microsoft responsible for many of the data design time features in Visual Studio. Steve’s team owns the Typed DataSet designer, Data Wizards and the new Data Sources window. His background in broadcast engineering, e-commerce startups, and consulting has taken him through the cycles of client, browser, CE; and with .NET, returned to client-based apps that leverage the Internet as the transport. After years of criticizing various Microsoft product teams, Steve joined the Visual Studio team as a program manager and now strives to answer others who are just as critical.

Eric Lee, Microsoft
Eric joined Microsoft in 1998 and has spent his career as a tester, developer, and is now one of the product managers for Visual Studio Team System. He previously held positions on the Windows Server 2003 team, where he contributed to Enterprise UDDI Services. Eric graduated from the University of Western Ontario in Computer Science.

Steve Lees, Microsoft

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.

Robert McLaws, Interscape Technologies
Robert McLaws is President and Chief Software Architect of Interscape Technologies, Inc., a .NET component vendor based in Mesa. He is also an ASP.NET MVP, and can usually be found writing, either for his .NET blog, his corporate blog, or as a new contributor on Lockergnome.com.

Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle
Andy Mendelsohn is the Senior Vice President of Oracle's Database Development group. He most recently lead the development of the Oracle Database 10g product. Andy started at Oracle in 1984 as a developer on the Oracle version 5 database. Prior to Oracle, Andy worked at Hewlett Packard and ESVEL. Andy received a B.S.E. in computer science from Princeton University and did graduate work at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

Mark Miller, Developer Express

Russ Nemhauser
Russ Nemhasuer is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His recent projects include enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ speaks at several industry conferences each year write for several magazines and online software community sites.

Jimmy Nilsson, JNSK
Jimmy Nilsson is the owner of the Swedish consulting company, JNSK AB. He has been working with system development for sixteen years. He has written numerous technical articles and is the author of .NET Enterprise Design with Visual Basic .NET and SQL Server 2000. Jimmy is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled “Applying Enterprise Architecture Patterns.”

Godfrey Nolan, RIIS
Godfrey Nolan is the President of RIIS LLC, a consultancy based in Royal Oak, MI that specializes in optimizing and performance tuning ASP and ASP.NET websites. He has talked at several conferences including JavaOne, ASP Connections, Web Devcon, and VSLive!. He's written dozens of articles for various magazines and newspapers in the United States and Europe.

Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
Fritz Onion is a founding partner of Pluralsight, a think-tank organization delivering in-depth technical content and training, where he focuses on Web development with ASP.NET. He is the author of the book Essential ASP.NET (Addison Wesley), and is currently working on a second edition that will cover ASP.NET 2.0. He frequently publishes articles on .NET in journals such as MSDN Magazine, DOTNETPRO, MSDN Online, and InformIT. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences and is the track chair for ASP.NET at Win-Dev in Boston.

Robert Patton, Optimum Technology
Robert A. Patton (MCDBA, MCSD, MCSE+I, MCP+I) is a Senior Consultant for Optimum Technology, a public sector technology services company in Ohio, specializing in Microsoft Windows .NET solutions. He is a frequent speaker and has authored and edited several books, including SQL Server 2000.Net.

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.

Walt Ritscher, Scandiasoft
Walt Ritscher has trained thousands of corporate developers during the last ten years. An active speaker, his teaching schedule has taken him throughout the U.S. providing training at corporations, universities and developer conferences .He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market. Walt’s industry expertise has placed him on various advisory boards including technology advisor for the National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies.

Thomas Rizzo, Microsoft
Tom Rizzo has worked at Microsoft for the past nine years in a variety of roles including in the Microsoft field sales force as a systems engineer, a variety of roles in Microsoft’s server products including Exchange Server, SharePoint, and BizTalk Server and most recently SQL Server. He is also the author of a series of Microsoft Press books including the newly published Programming Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, 3rd Edition.

Marius Roets, Woolworths, SA
Marius Roets serves as the enterprise integration architect at Woolworths, a South African retailer, and he is also responsible for the IBM WebSphere MQ messaging infrastructure. Roets and his team focus on building the company's integration interfaces between all systems on all the hardware platforms and applications. He also implemented an integrated management framework for the integration environment and all the different operating and application management products in Woolworths. Roets graduated from University of the Orange Freestate in Bloemfontein, South Africa, with a B.Sc. degree in Physics, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science..

Eric Rudder, Microsoft
Eric Rudder currently serves as senior vice president of Servers and Tools at Microsoft, and is also responsible for leading the company’s outreach to the developer community. Rudder and his team focus on coordinating the overall programming model for the client and server, creating the best tools for the .NET platform and fostering synergies between Windows and the Windows Server System offerings. Prior to leading the Developer and Platform Evangelism division, Rudder was vice president of Technical Strategy working directly with Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Microsoft’s technical planning processes. He also has worked in several other areas at Microsoft, including networking, operating systems and developer tools, where he previously served as general manager for Visual Studio.

Doug Seven, DotNetJunkies.com
As one of the co-founders of DotNetJunkies.com, a content- based online training resource for .NET developers, Doug Seven has been building applications with the .NET Framework since the summer of 2000. Seven is a charter member of both the INTEA Speaker’s Bureau and the INTEA-LATAM Speaker’s Bureau, speaking at user groups and conferences around the country. Seven has also co-authored five books related to the .NET Framework.

Brian Schmitt, Citigate Hudson
Brian Schmitt is Vice President of Software Development for Citigate Hudson. Brian has been the principal Project Manager and Technical Architect for several projects at Citigate Hudson and a valued contributor on many more. Brian has wide ranging experience from Software Engineering to Network Architecture. Most recently he was instrumental in the design and implementation of a near real-time Business Intelligence application.

Dominic Selly, Intertech Training
Dominic Selly is an Intertech trainer and consultant. He is a frequent presenter at VSLive, Connections, and SD Expo conferences. Dominc is also a co-author of Visual Basic .NET at Work from Wiley. He has also been teaching developers for many years, in topics including ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, XML, Visual Basic, ASP, and SQL Server. He is the author of a five day ASP.NET course, and co-created the Web Application Development Certificate program offered at George Washington Univ. in DC.

Christian Shay, Oracle
Christian Shay is a product manager in the Windows Development group at Oracle. He has worked at Oracle for 11 years on the Windows platform where he has held a variety of roles including being lead software engineer responsible for Oracle Objects for OLE.

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.

Yasser Shohoud, Microsoft
Yasser Shohoud is a Trainer and Consultant specializing in XML Web services. He is the author of Building Web Services with VB .NET, Addison Wesley, 2002. A Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for ASP.NET, Yasser is an active member of the Web services community providing hands-on training classes and publishing the monthly .NET Web Services newsletter.

S. "Soma" Somasegar, Microsoft
S. "Soma" Somasegar is Corporate VP of the Developer Division at Microsoft, which is primarily responsible for all the developer-related languages, tools, and platforms within Microsoft, including Visual Studio, Web Platform and Tools, .NET Framework, Common Language Runtime (CLR), and other .NET Developer Platform technologies.

Ajay Sudan, Microsoft
Ajay is a product manager for Visual Studio Team System in the Developer Division at Microsoft. In this role, he is responsible for technical evangelism, marketing, and product planning for Visual Studio Team Architect Edition. Ajay graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Kimberly Tripp, SYSolutions, Inc.
Kimberly Tripp is a SQL Server MVP and a Microsoft Regional Director and has worked with SQL Server since 1990. Since 1995, Kimberly has worked as a speaker, writer, trainer and consultant for her own company SYSolutions, Inc. (www.SQLskills.com) where she focuses on creating interesting and educational content around building scalable and available SQL Server-based systems.

Chuck Urwiler, Mentis Solutions
Chuck Urwiler is a Senior Technologist for Mentis Solutions, LLC. He has more than 10 years experience in designing and building software solutions for a variety of businesses. While primarily a developer, Chuck has also been a featured speaker at national conferences, local user groups and seminars, and has authored magazine articles, books, and courseware.

Gordon Van Huizen, Sonic Software
Gordon Van Huizen is chief technology officer (CTO) for Sonic Software. In this role, he leads the company's technology strategy and standards initiatives. Van Huizen works closely with Sonic's strategic partners and customers, as well as the company's product group to help chart the course of Sonic's integration products. Prior to his appointment as CTO, Van Huizen served as vice president of product management at Sonic, overseeing the launch of Sonic ESB® (then SonicXQ™ and SonicMQ® 5.0. Van Huizen provided a driving force in bringing the industry's first enterprise service bus (ESB) to market. He also played an instrumental role in the acquisition and integration of eXcelon Corporation in 2002.

Peter Varhol, Progress Software
Peter Varhol is principal product manager for developer tools at Progress Software. He writes on software development topics in a variety of different technology publications, and speaks on application architecture and design at industy conferences. Peter's credentials include graduate degrees in computer science and mathematics, and has taught both subjects at the university level.

Madhavan Vasudevan, DataPower
Before joining DataPower, Madhavan Vasudevan led the enterprise research effort at Sand Hill Group, working closely with the firm's founder M.R. Rangaswami. He recently authored a report, A Blueprint For Enterprise Security: Execution Strategies From Industry Visionaries, that presents insight gained from in-depth interviews with security decision makers. Previously, Madhavan directed product management and marketing for two emerging technology firms: Jarna, an enterprise wireless middleware company that was acquired by Visto, and Gigabeat, a personalization startup specializing in digital-media delivery that was acquired by Napster. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University, a doctorate in biochemical engineering from Rutgers University, and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.

Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corp.
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.

Scott Watermasysk, Telligent Systems

Terry Weiss, Mentis Solutions