Francesco Balena
Francesco Balena is MSDN Regional Director for Italy and author of “Programming Microsoft Visual Basic” series (VB6, VB2002, VB2003, and VB2005 editions), author of “Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005: The Base Class Library”, co-author of “Applied .NET Framework Programming in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET” (with Jeffrey Richter) and “Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers” (with Giuseppe Dimauro), all from Microsoft Press. Francesco is co-founder of Code Architects, an Italian software company that specializes in programmers’ tools and since 2006 he worked as the lead developer of VB Migration Partner, an innovative tool to convert VB6 applications to VB.NET. Francesco keeps a technical blog at www.dotnet2themax.com and recently launched www.vbmigration.com – a web site entirely devoted to VB migration topics.

Paul J. Cosgrave, Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, New York City
Paul J. Cosgrave was appointed Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on June 14, 2006.  Throughout his more than 30 years of experience in both the public and private sectors, Commissioner Cosgrave has devoted his career to using the power of technology to make people and the organizations they serve more effective.  At DoITT, Commissioner Cosgrave is committed to ensuring that City services are transparent, accountable and accessible to all New Yorkers. 

Among his accomplishments at DoITT is PlanIT: Better Government through Customer Service, the City’s first-ever comprehensive technology strategy for coordinated, effective and efficient citywide IT implementation.  PlanIT builds on the City’s technology accomplishments during the Bloomberg Administration and creates a strategic approach to new initiatives going forward.  With an overarching theme of customer service, PlanIT strives to change the focus of e-government to that which first and foremost serves the customer. 

Commissioner Cosgrave earned a BS and MS in Industrial Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He is a native New Yorker, born in Flushing, Queens, and is the father of three grown children.  He currently resides in lower Manhattan.

During Mike’s tenure at Microsoft he managed a team of technical evangelists. In this capacity he saw Microsoft .NET transform from a vision to become reality. His team was responsible for a number of high-profile, high-scale, implementations such as the City of London traffic congestion project, as well as projects on the other end of the spectrum such as Smartphone applications.

Allan Da Costa Pinto, Microsoft Corporation
Allan is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, who truly believes that software is magic and he is inspired by his customers, colleagues and competitors. As an evangelist, Allan gets to use both sides of his brain and his heart in helping others become more successful. Allan focuses on educating developers and architects on the merits of Microsoft’s vision for connected systems and in 8.5 years with Microsoft, he has been in various roles from consulting to support. He has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/allandcp

Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
Benjamin Day is an independent consultant specializing in the design and development of web and Windows applications using Microsoft .NET technologies. Ben also provides consulting and training on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server via the Richard Hale Shaw Group (www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com). He is a Microsoft MVP for C#, speaker at VSLive! and other conferences, and the leader of the Beantown.NET INETA User Group in Boston. When not developing software, Ben plays piano with a Boston-based jazz trio and is an enthusiastic restaurant, food, beer and wine buff. He can be contacted via www.benday.com.

G. Andrew Duthie, Microsoft Corporation
G. Andrew Duthie, aka .net DEvHammer, is the .net Developer Evangelist for Microsoft’s Mid-Atlantic States district, where he provides support and education for developers working with the .net development platform. In addition to his work with Microsoft, Andrew is the author of several books on ASP.NET and web development, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences from VSLive! to Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) and Tech-Ed. Andrew can be reached through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/.

Mary Jo Foley
Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years and has been keeping a close eye on Microsoft strategy, products, and technologies for most of that time.

Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
Ken Getz is a developer, writer and trainer, working as a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC, a Microsoft Solution Provider. He is a lead courseware author and trainer for AppDev (http://www.appdev.com), and has written and presented video courses covering C# and Visual Basic 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, ADO.NET 2.0 and more. Ken has co-authored several technical books for developers, including the best-selling ASP.NET Developer’s Jumpstart, Access Developer’s Handbook series, and VBA Developer’s Handbook series. Ken is a technical editor for Advisor Publications’ VB.NET Technical Journal, and he's a columnist for both MSDN Magazine and CoDe magazine. Ken speaks regularly at a large number of industry events, including Advisor Media’s Advisor Live events, FTP’s VSLive, and Microsoft’s Tech-Ed.

Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
Jackie is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Microsoft MVP, the founder and monthly host of the Israel VB User Group, and is a featured speaker at international developer events including VSLive!, TechEd, Microsoft Developer Days, and Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Jackie works closely with Microsoft in the U.S., Israel, and throughout Europe. He was chosen by Microsoft as the Microsoft Regional Director of the Year for 1999 and also received the 2004 Outstanding Regional Director Award.

David Isbitski, Microsoft Corporation
David Isbitski is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft.  He works directly with companies across several industries including Retail, Health & Life Sciences, and Financial Services to create solutions on the Microsoft platform.  Dave enjoys talking about technology and has taught full day courses on various Microsoft topics as well as being a frequent presenter at Microsoft Events such as ReMix, MSDN Events, and Microsoft DevDays.  His current passion is around web related technologies and user experience.  Dave frequently posts to his blog (blogs.msdn.com/davedev), has a website (CoolStuffWith.net) and also runs a group on Facebook called Developers for Developers.

Michael S. Jones, Passport Health Communications
Michael is a hands-on software architect employed by Passport Health Communications, a national leader in healthcare revenue cycle management.  Michael has worked on projects ranging from early cross-platform IPC libraries at the Naval Research Laboratory and clinical applications at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to highly scalable distributed applications at Passport Health Communications.  Michael's work has taken the form of client/server libraries, widely deployed client applications, web applications, and service-oriented architectures (SOA).  Though his experience is much broader, Michael's greatest technical experience has been with Microsoft servers and toolsets such as COM, .NET, SQL Server, ASP/ASP.NET, etc.  Michael is hands-on and works directly with developers in both consulting and development roles to help define a project's architecture and deliverables.  Michael has written extensively on architectural topics facing Microsoft and .NET developers, speaks at local and national developer conferences, provides consulting expertise for a nationwide list of clients, and blogs at http://www.thesoftwaredevotional.com.

Angus Logan, Microsoft Corporation
Senior Technical Product Manager Angus Logan is a Senior Technical Product Manager in the Windows Live Platform team in Redmond. Angus’s team is responsible for all technical marketing content ranging from conference presentations (MIX, TechEd) to online samples (Windows Live Quick Apps). Prior to being on the Windows Live Platform team, Angus was a Portals Technology Specialist with Microsoft Australia. Prior to that, Angus worked for several Microsoft partners, was an MVP, and co-authored a book on Microsoft Content Management Server. You can read Angus’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/angus_logan/

Anthony Lombardo, Infragistics
Tony Lombardo is the lead Technical Evangelist in the Worldwide Evangelism Group at Infragistics, the world’s leading publisher of presentation layer tools. Tony has a deep technical background in ASP.NET and his community participation has earned him the ASP.NET MVP Award from Microsoft. Tony co-runs the Central Jersey .NET Users Group, and often writes for both online and printed publications, including ASP.NET Pro, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, .NET Developers Journal and Redmond Developer News.

Javier Lozano, Imagetek, Inc.
Javier is an ASP.NET MVP that specializes in ASP.NET, system architecture, and training.  During the day, he enjoys helping Imagetek, an enterprise content management provider based in Grimes, Iowa, to deliver quality products and services to their clients.  Outside of work, Javier has helped co-found the Iowa .NET Users Group as well as the Iowa Code Camp.  He’s also a co-author of the ASP.NET 3.5 Programmer’s Reference which is published by Wrox.

Sajee Mathew, Microsoft Corporation
Sajee Mathew focuses on Visual Studio Team System as a Technology Specialist for Microsoft.  Sajee has been with Microsoft for 11 years in various roles.  Sajee's background is in software development, primarily on the Microsoft stack.

Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
Fritz Onion is a founding partner of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Fritz is the author of Pluralsight's ASP.NET curriculum, and teaches course offerings around the world. He is the author of the highly acclaimed books Essential ASP.NET and Essential ASP.NET 2.0 (Addison Wesley).

He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, TechEd, and VSLive!. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL. Microsoft recognizes Fritz as an MVP for his contributions to the ASP.NET community. You can read Fritz's blog at http://pluralsight.com/fritz/.

John Papa, ASPSOFT
John is a Microsoft C# MVP and INETA Speaker who has enterprise experience architecting and developing with .NET technologies focusing on architecture, patterns and practices, data access and mobile development. John has authored or co-authored several books on data access technologies, is the author of the "Data Points" column in MSDN Magazine, and most recently John is the author of Data Access with Silverlight 2 by O’Reilly. He can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive. Contact John at www.johnpapa.net

Keith Pijanowski, Microsoft Corporation
Keith Pijanowski is a Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism team. As a Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft he spends a lot of his time researching the ever changing software industry. Some of the new ideas he is currently investing are: SOA as an Enterprise Architecture, Software plus Services, Software as a Service, Composite Applications, Web 2.0, and Social Networking.

Keith enjoys investigating both the architectural underpinnings of these new ideas as well as the impact each will have on the business models of companies that adopt these ideas. Keith has 20 years of experience in the Software Industry. He has been with Microsoft for 6 of those years. Prior to joining Microsoft he worked for various organizations solving problems in the Health Care, Financial Services, and Professional Services industries. He graduated from Boston University's college of Engineering in 1987 and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. Keith writes for MSDN Magazine and various developer and architect centers within Microsoft's MSDN site. He is also a frequent speaker at Microsoft events and community events in the New York/New Jersey area. You can reach Keith at www.KeithPij.com.

Brian A. Randell, MCW Technologies
Brian A. Randell is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC. Brian spends his time between teaching Microsoft .NET -based technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System, and consulting worldwide for clients such as Microsoft, American Honda, DELL and others. Brian enjoys helping people get the most out of their software. He does this through training, consulting and speaking at events such as VSLive!, Tech•Ed and the PDC. In addition, Brian shares through the written word. He is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic and has written articles for MSDN Magazine and Microsoft. He is also a member of Pluralsight's technical staff and author of Pluralsight's Applied Team System course. Reach Brian via his blog at http://www.mcwtech.com/cs/blogs/brianr/. 

Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
VSLive! Dallas Conference Chair
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! and the 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 Managed C++. Richard is a member of the INETA (http://www.ineta.org/) speakers bureau, and for his work supporting C#/.NET software developers, he's been recognized by Microsoft as a C# MVP since 2004. You can reach him at www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com.

Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Paul D. Sheriff is the President of PDSA, Inc., a Microsoft Partner in Southern California. Paul acts as the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California assisting the local Microsoft offices with Developer Days and several of their large events each year. Paul has authored five books on .NET and two on SharePoint in the form of eBooks that can be purchased at the PDSA web site at www.pdsa.com/ebooks. Paul can be reached via email at PSheriff@pdsa.com.

Michael Stiefel, Reliable Software, Inc.
Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc., is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves: Training in service oriented and distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++ and SQL Server. Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring and growth management. Design and implementation service based applications including Web services. Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development. Expert Witness for intellectual property cases. He is currently a member of the OASIS Technical Committee developing a core SOA Reference Model and related Reference Architectures. In July 2006, Stiefel was named a Microsoft Visual Developer - Solutions Architect MVP. You can find more information about him at www.reliablesoftware.com.

Jim Williams, Microsoft Corporation
Jim has been with Microsoft since 1997 and worked with a variety of clients and industries as a consultant, and for 3 years, as a .NET evangelist. His current title is architect - but if you've seen a recent Dilbert cartoon about the architect title - he's trying to think of a new one.