VSLive! San Francisco 2008

Conference Speakers

	Bill D. Baldasti Bill is a Director & Practice Manager at Infusion Development. Bill is a Microsoft MVP, Solutions Architect, a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). In addition to architecture and development, Bill has been a member of Microsoft’s .NET Trainer tour across the USA, was the #1 ranked trainer on Microsoft’s Windows 2003 training tour in July 2003, and speaks at various conferences – most recently the Microsoft Financial Services Developer conference in New York, VSLive! Toronto, and Microsoft's PDC05 in Los Angeles.
	Perry Birch, Accentient Perry is currently a Solutions Architect / Trainer for Accentient, consulting across a broad range of Microsoft technologies including Applications in C#.Net, ASP.Net, Sharepoint 2007, InfoPath 2007, SQL Server and Team Foundation Server to name a few. Perry is also a trainer and speaker that has delivered courses on Sharepoint 2007 Development and Team Foundation Server as well as presentations on DLinq.
	Jason Bock, Magenic Technologies Jason Bock is a consultant for Magenic Technologies and has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "CIL Programming: Under the Hood(tm) of .NET" and ".NET Security" by Apress, and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial", and has written numerous articles on technical development issues associated with both VB and Java. Jason holds a B.A. and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.
	Robert Boedigheimer, Schwan Food Company Robert Boedigheimer works for The Schwan Food Company providing business solutions with web technologies. Robert has been designing and developing web sites for the past 10 years including the early days of ASP and ASP.NET. He was the lead architect, designer, and developer for the schwans.com rewrite with ASP.NET, and is currently implementing a large ASP.NET 2.0 project. He is a columnist for aspalliance.com, an "Early Achiever" MCSD for .NET with C#, and a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Robert has spoken at several industry conferences including the Heartland Developers Conference, Microsoft's Visual DevCon 2005, and several VSLive! events.
	Steven Borg, Northwest Cadence Steven Borg is a principal of Northwest Cadence, a Microsoft VSTS Inner Circle partner that focuses exclusively on helping companies improve their Application Lifecycle Management using Team System. At Northwest Cadence, he is the VSTS Practice Lead, and has worked with dozens of corporations to improve their overall software development process. In addition, he assists the Team System community as a Team System MVP, and is both an accomplished speaker and writer.
	Kent Brown, twentysix New York Kent Brown is the manager of the Enterprise Integration practice at twentysix New York, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Kent has 17 years of experience in software development in the Pharmaceutical, Financial Services, Insurance, Legal and Manufacturing industries. He has authored numerous articles primarily on Enterprise Integration technologies: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), BizTalk, SOAP. He has been involved with .NET since its early Beta. He often plays a mentoring role, providing training, design and team leadership to help teams establish correct architecture and best practices around new technologies, e.g. Object-Oriented programming in .NET, and Service-Oriented Architecture. He is the founder and leader of the NJ .NET Architecture and Development User Group, www.njevbug.org. He is also a leader of the NYC Connected Systems User Group, www.nyccsug.org.
	Andrew Brust, twentysix New York Andrew Brust is Chief, New Technology at twentysix New York, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in New York City. Andrew is lead author of Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Microsoft Press), serves as Microsoft Regional Director for New York and New Jersey, is a Visual Basic MVP and a 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@26ny.com.
	Anthony Cangialosi, Microsoft Corporation Anthony Cangialosi is Program Manager on the Visual Studio Ecosystem team. As the Partner Program manager Anthony serves as a technical representative for the Visual Studio Industry Partner program and works on a variety of projects that supports their work in the VS ecosystem. Anthony holds a bachelor of science in computer science, masters in business administration, and 6 years of experience at Microsoft. During his time Anthony has worked on a variety of teams in Visual Studio and has helped shipped managed device development in Visual Studio 2003, native device development in Visual Studio 2005, the VS 2005 Extensions for WPF & WCF, VS 2005 & 2008 SDKs and most recently has worked on delivering the Visual Studio Gallery.
	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.
	Robert Daigneau, SynXix Rob Daigneau has over eighteen years experience designing and implementing enterprise-class applications for a broad array of industries from manufacturing, to financial services, to retail and hospitality. Rob is currently the Chief Architect for SynXis, the leader in distribution and messaging software technologies for the hospitality industry. He also has served as the Director of Application Architecture for Monster.com. Rob is currently working on a book of SOA Design Patterns for Addison Wesley.
	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.
	Don Demsak Don Demsak (aka DonXML) is a Microsoft MVP for XML and a .Net Solutions Architect consultant, who specializes in architecting and programming multi-tier applications using Microsoft's .Net framework. He is an evangelist that is known for preaching the benefits of XML, Web Services Contract First, and the .Net framework on various discussion groups across the web and on his blog. Don is one of the founders of the Mvp.Xml open source project (www.mvpxml.org), which is helping to enhance the XML capabilities in the .Net framework, which includes the XPathmania project, which adds XPath testing support to the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005.
	Ketan Duvedi, Microsoft Corporation Ketan Duvedi is the Development Lead of the SQL Service Broker Team. He has been a developer in the SQL Engine team for the last 7 years and has worked on eventing, plan caching and query parameterization before being part of the Service Broker team. He stays with his wife and son in Seattle.
	Steven Fox, Microsoft Corporation Steven Fox is a 7 year veteran at Microsoft. He has worked with a number of different technologies including natural language, search, social computing, and more recently Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). He is a customer-facing Program Manager and spends a lot of time with VSTO customers, evangelists and advocates.
	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, 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.
	Jonathan Goodyear, ASPSOFT, Inc Jonathan is the President of ASPSOFT, Inc. as well as being a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. He has been working with .NET since before it was made available to the general public. Jonathan is a contributing editor for both Visual Studio Magazine and asp.netPRO Magazine, and frequently speaks at major technology conferences such as VSLive and .NET user groups through the International .NET Association (INETA).
	Torsten Grabs, Microsoft Corporation Torsten works as a Program Manager for the Microsoft SQL Server Query Processor. His responsibilities currently cover a broad range of areas in SQL Server from relational data warehousing to reliability of query processing to features such as cache sync (aka query notifications). Torsten is with Microsoft SQL Server since early 2004 serving in different roles in development and program management. Torsten holds a PhD in database systems from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.
	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.
	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.
	Richard Hundhausen, Accentient Richard Hundhausen is a principal consultant with Accentient. He has over 20 years of software and database development experience and over 15 years of training and presentation experience. His primary area of evangelism is the ever-expanding intersection between .NET development and SQL Server development and, as a result, became a Microsoft Regional Director in 2004. Richard's most recent book is Working with Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Microsoft Press. He is Visual Studio Team System MVP and travels the world evangelizing these technologies. He calls Boise, Idaho home.
	Scott Hunter, Microsoft Corporation Scott Hunter is a program manager on the ASP.NET team. He is currently working on the Dynamic Data feature and other features relating to data. Scott has over 20+ years working in the industry and has spent the past 7 years building web applications on the ASP.NET platform. You can find him online at http://blogs.msdn.com/scothu/.
	Gareth Jones, Microsoft Corporation Gareth Jones is a senior development lead in the Visual Studio eXtensibility Ecosystem group at Microsoft. For the last four years he's been working on DSL Tools and software factories and now he's broadening those techniques to help make extending Visual Studio with any of your own tools a much easier, more accessible proposition. He co-authored the book Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools with other members of the DSL Tools team. Previously at Microsoft he has been a development manager for bespoke enterprise solutions, led the development of Microsoft's bCentral UK business portal and managed a consultancy team focussed on ISVs. Before joining Microsoft, Gareth led developments in the intelligence analysis, simulation and aerospace industries.
	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).
	Jeff Levinson, Northwest Cadence Jeff Levinson is the ALM Practice Lead for Northwest Cadence specializing in process, methodology and Team System. He is a Microsoft Team System MVP, MCAD, MCSD, MCDBA and MCT. Jeff is a former Solution Design & Integration Architect with The Boeing Company. He is the author of ³Building Client/Server Applications with VB.NET² (Apress 2003) and ³Pro Visual Studio Team System with Team Edition for Database Professionals² (Apress 2007). Jeff has a Masters in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
	Rockford Lhotka, Magenic Technologies Rockford Lhotka is the author of the Expert VB 2005 Business Objects and Expert C# 2005 Business Objects books 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.
	Jesse Liberty, Microsoft Corporation Jesse Liberty is a Microsoft Senior Program Manager in the Silverlight Development Division whose business card reads “Silverlight Geek”. He is responsible for development of material to facilitate the learning and use of Silverlight and to foster a Silverlight Developer community. Jesse is the author of numerous international bestselling books and articles, including O'Reilly Media's forthcoming Programming Silverlight, Programming .NET 3.5, Programming C# 3.0 with Visual Studio 2008 and Learning ASP.NET with AJAX. Jesse has over two decades experience programming, consulting and training and has been, during that time, a Distinguished Software Engineer at AT&T; Chief Architect for PBS/Learning Link; Vice President of Human Information Technology at Citibank; and Microsoft MVP.
	Leonard Lobel, Sleek Technologies, Inc. Leonard Lobel is the CEO and co-founder of Sleek Technologies Inc., a development shop located in New York specializing in Microsoft-based solutions with an early adopter philosophy towards new technologies. Programming since 1979, his experience spans a variety of business domains, including publishing and retail store management. Lenni has served as chief architect and senior developer for various organizations, ranging from small shops to high-profile clients. He is also a consultant and trainer, and has been a contributing editor to Visual Studio Magazine. Contact him at llobel@sleektechnologies.com.
	Fernando Azpeitia Lopez, Microsoft Corporation Fernando joined Microsoft as a Program Manager two years ago and owns the Full-Text Search (FTS) component of SQL Server. Besides the large amount of interesting work to do in Full-Text Search in SQL Server, he focuses some of his time on the whole Search scenario at Microsoft, trying to have regular contact with other Microsoft Search solutions like Windows Desktop Search, MOSS, etc… If you want to Search and find what you are looking for in SQL Server, Fernando is the guy to talk to. You can send e-mail to Fernando at fernlope@microsoft.com.
	David Lowe, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation David Lowe is Senior Product Manager for Windows Server with Microsoft Corporation. In this role, he manages worldwide evaluation and deployment programs for Windows Server 2008. David has been with Microsoft since 2001, and in this time he has also been Senior Product Manager for Security and IT Professional portfolios with Microsoft Learning. Prior to joining Microsoft, David was Senior Lecturer in Internet Technologies at the Centre for Advanced Technology Training in Dublin, Ireland, where he specialized in Web development and XML. David holds a Bachelor of Science degree from University College, Dublin, and he is the author of "BizTalk Server: The Complete Reference", published by Osborne-McGraw Hill.
	Jeffrey McManus, Platform Associates Jeffrey is Principal Consultant at Platform Associates, dividing his time between consulting and developing and running the collaboration web site Approver.com. Jeffrey has been a speaker at VBITS/VSLIVE since 1998 and has authored six books on software development on the Microsoft platform, including the best-selling "Database Access with Visual Basic." He was eBay's first web services evangelist, forming and leading their platform evangelism team and managing developer.ebay.com and codebase.ebay.com. Jeffrey also co-founded and led Yahoo's developer program.
	Kevin McNeish, Oak Leaf Enterprises Kevin McNeish is President and Chief Software Architect of Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc, and a Microsoft .NET MVP. He is a speaker with MSDN Canada Speaker’s Bureau and is also a well known speaker and trainer throughout North America and Europe, including VSLive!, DevTeach (where he serves as one of the .NET chairs), SDC Netherlands, and Advisor DevCon. He is co-author of the book "Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET", author of the book ".NET for Visual FoxPro Developers", has authored several articles for CoDe magazine and has been interviewed on the .NET Rocks! Internet Radio Show. He is the Chief Software Architect of the MM .NET Framework and spends about half his time on the road training and mentoring companies to build well-designed, high-performance .NET applications. He has also helped many developers transition to the .NET development platform in his highly acclaimed .NET training classes and highly acclaimed Kevin McNeish’s Guide to .NET video series. e-mail: kevinm@oakleafsd.com
	Chris Menegay, Notion Solutions, Inc. Chris Menegay is a Development Process Consultant for Notion Solutions, Inc., a consulting and training firm specializing in software development process and Visual Studio Team System. He has been working with Team System full-time since late 2004. Chris has obtained a broad understanding of information technology by sharing best practices with the client companies he has worked with over the past 10 years. As a consultant, he has served in many different roles in the software development process. Chris has been a project manager, analyst, architect, developer, and tester. This broad background has given him insight into not only the technical challenges that face software projects, but the procedural challenges as well. He has written white papers and articles on Team System for MSDN and MSDN Magazine. Chris is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Microsoft Regional Director and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau.
	Mark Michaelis, intelliTechture Mark Michaelis is the IDesign architect specializing in WCF and VSTS as well as a independent consultant with intelliTechture in Spokane, WA . Mark was recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio Team System and he wrote to official courseware for VSTS for Microsoft. Mark holds a MS in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and he serves on several Microsoft Software Design Review teams including WCF, C# and VSTS. Mark speaks at developer conferences both nationally and internationally and has written several articles and books, in addition to maintaining a blog. His most recent book is Essential C# 2.0 (Addison-Wesley, 2006).
	Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media Russ Nemhauser 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 and writes for several magazines and online software community sites.
	Brian Noyes, IDesign Brian Noyes is a software architect, trainer, writer, and speaker with IDesign, a premier .NET architecture and design consulting and training company. Brian has been developing software systems for more than fifteen years, speaks at many major software conferences around the world, and writes for a variety of software journals and magazines.
	Vineet Rao, Microsoft Corporation Vineet Rao is a Program Manager in the SQL Server Relational Engine group at Microsoft. Vineet has over seven years of experience in the industry with the past three years in this group. During this time, he has worked on various aspects involved in the server-side programmability area especially the integration of .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) in SQL Server and its support in Visual Studio 2005.
	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/.
	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. Walt has accumulated plenty of experience as a developer — he is fluent in database, component, and win-forms technologies. As a web programmer he has worked on several prototype ASP.NET projects including the Microsoft Community Starter Kit. His company, Scandiasoft, produces developer tools.
	Stephanie Saad, Microsoft Corporation Stephanie Saad is a Group Manager in Visual Studio Team System. One of the founding members of the Database Edition and the leader of the planning for the next major VSTS release, Stephanie today runs the development team that delivers Agile solutions on top of VSTS.
	Jay Schmelzer, Microsoft Corporation Jay Schmelzer is the Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for the Visual Studio design-time tools and runtime components used to build applications that leverage Microsoft Office client and server products, many of the Visual Studio features vital to end-to-end application development experience including Data Design-time, building and consuming WCF services and Deployment, as well as the application programmability and extensibility available in Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. Jay has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at conferences.
	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! 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.
	Amanda Silver, Microsoft Corporation Amanda Silver has been working on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for 6+ years on Visual Basic. For the 2008 product cycle, she was the lead program manager for the Visual Basic core experience which includes language design, compiler, editor, debugger, and interoperability with VB6. The past several years have been devoted to enhancing data integration in the form the LINQ project (Language INtegrated Query) which incorporates SQL-style query expressions and XML as a first-class data type into the Visual Basic language. She has edited several books including Ted Pattison's Object Oriented Programming with Visual Basic .NET, the VB.NET Language printed by O'Reilly press, and Paul Vick's Visual Basic .NET. She's a regular speaker at developer conferences like VSLive, TechEd, PDC, and in user group meetings throughout the world and loves to ham it up as a frequent guest on live chats on MSDN, .NET Rocks, Channel9, and appearing on Microsoft's VBTV oh so many moons ago. She is a primary contributor to the vbteam blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam
	John Stallo, Microsoft Corporation John Stallo is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft working on RAD tools for building data-centric line-of-business applications. Born in Perth, Western Australia, he has been with Microsoft for over 6 years working on a variety of projects including WCF Tools, RAD data binding, Class Designer, and the BizTalk Orchestration Designer. He loves coding in Visual Basic and drinking fine wines, though not necessarily at the same time.
	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.
	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.
	Jason Zander. Microsoft Corporation Jason Zander is the General Manager of the .NET Framework (DevFX) team in the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation. As GM, Jason’s team responsibilities include the .NET Compact Framework for Windows CE/Mobile and the Xbox 360, the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Forms, Silverlight, and finally executive direction of the .NET Framework. As one of the original developers of the CLR, Jason’s primary technical area of contributions include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging/profiling, and integration of the system into key Microsoft products such as Windows and SQL Server. Before becoming GM, Jason held many roles on the CLR team including Product Unit Manager and Development Manager. Prior to working on the CLR, Jason worked on the Repository and SourceSafe products and before that on the first two versions of ODBC. Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Jason worked at IBM on Distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab. Jason holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MSU. In his spare time, Jason enjoys playing with his three children and making furniture in his shop. Jason's blog can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz.