VSLive! Orlando 2006

Conference Speakers

	David Anderson, Microsoft David Anderson works as a program manager with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond. He has 22 years experience in the software development business. David was a member of the team which created the agile software development method known as Feature Driven Development in Singapore between 1997 and 1999. He introduced FDD at Sprintpcs.com, the Internet business unit of Sprint PCS in Kansas City, MO, where he reported to John Yuzdepski, VP & GM. He was one of a core team who created the technical product offer for the launch of PCS Vision. He also launched the Sprint Application Developer program for wireless data applications in October 2001. David has held managerial positions at Motorola, Sprint PCS and earlier in his career with two startups in the UK—Rombo, a video imaging company—and MDi Systems, a document imaging company.

	Paul Andrew, Microsoft Paul Andrew is a Technical Product Manager at Microsoft Corporation responsible for product management of Windows Workflow Foundation. This includes representing the development team with customers and arranging Windows Workflow Foundation technical content. Paul was also the lead author of the book Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation which was published in 2005.

	Keith Brown, Pluralsight Keith Brown is a co-founder of Pluralsight where he focuses on application security. A contributing editor for MSDN Magazine, he authors the Security Briefs column. He authored the book Programming Windows Security (Addison Wesley, 2000), coauthored Effective COM (Addison Wesley, 1999), and has recently finished a new book: The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security, which you can read online at Pluralsight.com.

	Andrew Brust, twentysix New York SQL Live! Editorial Chair Andrew Brust is Chief, New Technology at twentysix New York, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in New York City. Andrew serves as Microsoft’s Regional Director for New York and New Jersey, Visual Basic MVP and member of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Partner Advisory Council. Andrew is a Vice-Chairman of the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA), a member of INETA’s Speaker Bureau and is a highly rated speaker at conferences throughout the U.S. and internationally. Often quoted in the technology industry press, Andrew has over 18 years’ experience programming and consulting in the Financial, Public, Small Business, and Not-For-Profit sectors. He can be reached at andrew.brust@citigatehudson.com.

	Miguel Castro, Infotek Consulting Group, Inc. Miguel Castro is a .NET consultant, author, speaker, and trainer with over 20 years of IT experience with a background in full automation solutions encompassing all aspects of a project’s life cycle, including data gathering, architecture, design, development, documentation, and training. He is a Microsoft MVP in the area of Visual Developer C#, recently awarded for 2005, and president of InfoTek Consulting Group, Inc., a provider of .NET consulting services to clients in the New York / New Jersey Metropolitan Area.

	Scott Cate, myKB.com, Inc. Scott Cate is the President of myKB.com, Inc., a technology company specializing in commercial ASP.NET applications. Scott's product line includes myKB.com (Knowledge Base Software), kbAlertz.com (Microsoft Knowledge Base Notifications), and EasySearchASP.net (a Pluggable Search Engine for ASP.NET sites). Scott also runs AZGroups.com (Arizona .NET User Groups), one of the largest and most active user group communities in the country, and is a member of ASPInsiders.com, a group devoted to giving early feedback to the Microsoft ASP.NET Team. Scott has also been awarded the ASP.NET MVP for three years in a row, from 2004-2006. He has co-authored an AJAX book titled "Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET" to be released in the summer of 2006 and the non-fiction novel "Surveillance" and can be found at http://surveillance-the-novel.com .

	Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting Benjamin Day is an independent consultant specializing in the design and development of Web and Windows database applications using Microsoft .NET technologies. With 9+ years of consulting experience, he has worked with clients such as Fidelity Investments, the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Deloitte Consulting, and Ceridian Lifeworks. He can be contacted via www.benday.com.

	Mark D'Urso, Microsoft Mark D’Urso is a developer currently working on creating the next generation content delivery and rendering system for MSDN and TechNet. He has been with Microsoft since April of 2000. During his time at Microsoft Mark has worked both on search and a variety of content rendering frameworks for Microsoft.com.

	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.

	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.

	Jonathan Goodyear, ASPSOFT Jonathan Goodyear is the president of ASPSoft, Inc. (www.aspsoft.com), an Internet consulting firm based in Orlando, FL. He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and is the author of Debugging ASP.NET from New Riders. He is also a contributing editor for Visual Studio Magazine and asp.netPRO Magazine, and speaks frequently at major technology conferences such as VSLive! Reach him at jon@aspsoft.com or through his angryCoder eZine at www.angryCoder.com

	Robert Green, MCW Technologies Robert Green is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Partner. Before joining MCW, Robert worked at Microsoft for 8 years, most recently as a Program Manager on the Visual Basic product team and previously as a Product Manager for Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual FoxPro. Prior to joining Microsoft, Robert was a Vice President and co-founder of The Information Management Group, a consulting and education services firm in Chicago. Robert has been a frequent speaker at technology conferences, including TechEd, VSLive! Along with co-author Ken Getz, Robert co-authored AppDev’s Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2005 courseware, and appears in the video training for these courses, as well.

	Sam Guckenheimer, Microsoft Sam Guckenheimer is leading the development plans for Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ bringing teams of developers, architects, customers and partner together. As with the development of Visual Studio 2005, customer input and transparency through every step of the process enabled Microsoft to release our most outstanding development product to date. This is the firm belief and commitment of Sam’s team for Orcas, to enable customer to drive the direction and future of both Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ and beyond.

	Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group Black-Belt Virtual Track Chair Richard 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! and Black Belt tracks 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.

	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.

	Robert Hurlbut, Hurlbut Consulting Robert Hurlbut is an independent software architect/developer and consultant and owner of Hurlbut Consulting, Inc. He is also a Microsoft MVP for Security Development. Robert specializes in application security, distributed architectures, and database architecture and development. He has spoken at industry conferences, including WIN-DEV, New England Code Camp, Heartland Developers Conference, and DevTeach. He has a .NET blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/rhurlbut.

	Trey Johnson, Idea Integration Trey Johnson is the Vice President and Chief Architect for the National Microsoft Solutions Consulting Practice at Idea Integration, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, with 8 Gold Certifications including Business Intelligence. Trey is also a member of Microsoft's Business Intelligence Partner Advisory Council. dditionally, he has been a member of the PASS Board of Directors since 2001 and currently serves as the Executive Vice President responsible for the areas of Finance and Technology. His industry experiences include speaking at Developer and SQL Server industry conferences, including the TechEd, PASS and VSLive! conferences. Trey has also authored or co-authored books and multiple whitepapers available from Microsoft on MSDN. He is the founder of a pure SQL Server Business Intelligence Web site and will eventually be found blogging at http://www.sqlserverbi.com/blogs/trey

	Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software ASP Live! Conference Chair 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.

	Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies Deborah 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. She is frequently brought in to assist existing teams with establishing best practices and defining an appropriate architecture and application framework. Deborah has authored several books, including the Doing Objects in Visual Basic series (SAMS), Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Apress) and Doing Web Development: Client-Side Techniques (Apress), and is currently working on Doing Objects in VB 2005 (Addison-Wesley). She also writes for MSDN and CoDe magazine (www.code-magazine.com).

	Vishwas Lele, Applied Information Sciences Vishwas Lele is a Principal Architect at Applied Information Sciences where he has been involved in the development of .NET based applications for a number of clients. He regularly conducts .NET classes including security seminars for developers. Vishwas has been a speaker at a number of developer events and has also authored many magazine articles and white papers on the .NET technology. Vishwas serves as the Microsoft Regional Director for the Washington DC area.

	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.

	Tarek Madkour, Lead Program Manager, Visual C++ Team, Microsoft Tarek Madkour spends his time ensuring that Visual C++ developers get an excellent IDE experience. Over the past five years, Tarek was responsible for different IDE components including the editor, code browsing, IntelliSense, the build system, project management tools and the debugger. Now he has all those components to stress about. Before joining Microsoft, he spent five years enjoying numerous technology roles in the sunniest spots of Cairo, Egypt. This included developing C++ software for networking and hardware testing, researching distributed systems, and managing several technology projects.

	Jason McConnell, Microsoft Jason is a Visual Studio Product Marketing Manager, looking after the marketing, positioning and customer requirements concerned with Microsoft’s programming language portfolio. He joined Microsoft Corporation in March of 2005 having spent 5 years with Microsoft Australia where he had been a community Developer Evangelist, ISV Developer Evangelist and Technology Specialist. He graduated from Monash University in 1995 and has held positions in the financial industry and the IT services industry prior to joining Microsoft. He enjoys seeing innovative software solutions change the way people work and live – for the better. He loves reading, music, good food, good wine and the company of good friends.

	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 and is also a regular speaker at industry conferences.

	John Papa, ASPSOFT John Papa, a Sr Consultant with ASPSOFT, has been working with Microsoft distributed architectures for 10 years and has developed with .NET since its early pre-beta days. He is a baseball fanatic who spends most of his summer nights rooting for the Yankees with his family and his faithful dog, Kadi. John has authored or co-authored several books on ADO, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server, is the author of a the Data Points column in MSDN Magazine and can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive. You can catch John on his blog at http://codebetter.com/blogs/john.papa

	Keith Pleas, Guided Design Smart Client Live! Conference Chair 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 Smart Client Live!. 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.

	Brian Randell, MCW Technologies Brian Randell is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Partner. Over the last 18 years, Brian has worked with companies and their developers to help the create solutions that leverage various Microsoft technologies. Today Brian splits up his time teaching Microsoft .NET -based technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio Team System, and consulting worldwide for clients. In addition to consulting, he does this through speaking at events such as VSLive!, TechEd, and the PDC or by sharing through the written word. He is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic* and the forthcoming Tom and Huck's Guide to Visual Basic Express (both from Addison-Wesley). Reach Brian at http://www.mcwtech.com/cs/blogs/brianr.

	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 world providing developer training at corporations, universities and software conferences .He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market including 'early adopter' .Net courses at Microsoft Press. Walt¹s industry expertise has placed him on various national technology advisory boards. He is also deeply involved in the local developer community — founding the .NET Developers Association in Redmond, WA

	Russ Ryan, Microsoft Russ Ryan has been at Microsoft for 9 years, but not all at once. He led Microsoft groups that developed C Compilers and the LAN Manager in the years 1982-1988, then left to pursue other goals including a couple of startup companies. The last of these was Chili!Soft, a company that produced a cross-platform Active Server Page (ASP) product for Solaris and Linux. The company was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems. In 2002 Russ rejoined Microsoft where he is Product Unit Manager (PUM) for the Developer Division Customer Product-Lifecycle Experience Team. This group is responsible for working with developers to help them succeed throughout the lifecycle of Visual Studio and .NET Framework products. It includes Service Releases, After Market Solutions, and Customer Connections (feedback and transparency).

	Andres Sanabria , Microsoft Andres Sanabria is the Lead Program Manager for ASP.NET at Microsoft. Andres drove features such as Web Parts, Core Controls, No Compile Page, Page Parser Filter, among other features, during the ASP.NET 2.0 Development cycle. Andres lives in Redmond with his wife and son and enjoys riding his bicycle.

	Jay Schmelzer, Microsoft Jay Schmelzer is the Lead Program Manager on the Visual Basic .NET Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for several feature areas including the Visual Basic .NET Editor, Debugger and Project System, Deployment and the My Namespace. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. He has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at conferences.

	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.

	Martin L. Shoemaker, Richard Hale Shaw Group Martin is a software developer with 20 years experience in the industry. He has worked in the fields of color science, on-line shopping, time-series databases, material handling, medical imaging, and customer relations management. He has twice been recognized by Microsoft Corporation as an MVP for Visual Development with C#. As an instructor and consultant for the Richard Hale Shaw Group, he offers his guidance and expertise to clients who need high-quality design services with UML, as well as custom software in the Windows and .NET environment. He’s obsessive about Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with UML, and he thinks you should be, too.

	Scott Swanson, Microsoft Scott Swanson has been at Microsoft since 1992. Starting in the field in Philadelphia, Scott later moved to the Redmond campus and began working on the Visual Basic team back when VB3 was shipping. He has worked with VB through version 7 and .NET and has subsequently spoken at several VBITS, VSLive! conferences. Scott is now presenting at VSLive! Orlando in his new role focusing on the MSN Messenger Platform.

	Richard Turner, Microsoft Richard Turner is the Product Manager for "InfoCard" in Microsoft's WinFX Strategy group. Richard is also responsible for articulating Microsoft's position on Service Orientation, SOA, ESB, EDA and how these concepts map against Microsoft's current and future application platforms. Richard moved to the USA in Jan 2003 to join the then "Indigo" team, and quickly took up the task of communicating how to select and use Microsoft's existing technology stack most appropriately and how to prepare for WCF. Before moving to the USA, Richard worked in Microsoft UK's Solution Development Center where he was Solution Architect for the foundations underlying the UK Government Gateway. Richard was also a Principal Consultant in Microsoft UK's Consulting Services helping customers build effective systems on top of Microsoft's technologies.

	John deVadoss, Microsoft John deVadoss is Director of Architecture Strategy at Microsoft. He has 15 years of experience in the software industry; he has been at Microsoft for 8 years, all of it in the enterprise space—as a consultant, as a program manager in the distributed applications platform division, as an architect working with some of Microsoft’s key partners, and most recently leading solutions architecture evangelism. Prior to Microsoft he spent many years as a technology consultant in the financial services industry in Silicon Valley. His areas of interest are broadly in distributed application architecture, data and metadata, systems management and currently on edge architectures (both services and access), but most of all in creating business value from technology investments.

	Bill Wolff, Agility Systems Bill Wolff is an independent consultant, trainer, and architect specializing in Microsoft development technologies. His company, Agility Systems, is based in the Philadelphia area. He ran the consulting firm Wolff Data Systems for 15 years and directed armies of consultants in the dot com world. Bill is founder and President of the philly.net user group, board member for INETA (Vice President, Speaker Bureau), and he is active in several other user communities. Bill was a contributing author to several books and articles. His certifications include trainer, systems engineer, developer, and Microsoft MVP for VB.NET.