VSLive Fall 2010

Conference Chairs & Advisors

Andrew Brust, Visual Studio Live! Orlando Co-chair

Andrew Brust is Chief Technology Officer at Tallan, Inc., a Microsoft National Systems Integrator (NSI) and Gold Partner, based outside of Hartford, Connecticut. Andrew is the co-founder of the NYC .NET Developers Group, co-author of Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (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. Often quoted in the technology industry press, and himself a columnist for Redmond Developer News and Visual Studio Magazine, Andrew has over 20 years' experience programming and consulting in the Financial, Public, Small Business and Not-For-Profit sectors. He can be reached at [email protected].

Michael Desmond

Desmond is a veteran editor and has worked for Redmond Developer News, PC World and Multimedia World Magazine. A well known Windows technical expert, Desmond has authored “Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades,” “The Windows 2000 Professional Bible,” “Tom’s Hardware Guide: High-Performance PC Secrets” and “Microsoft Office in 10 Steps or Less.”

Rockford Lhotka, Visual Studio Live! Redmond Co-chair

Principal Technology Evangelist, Magenic

Rockford Lhotka is the author of numerous books, including the new Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book. He is a Microsoft Regional Director, MVP and INETA speaker. He contributes to several major magazines and regularly presents at major conferences around the world. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic (www.magenic.com), a company focused on delivering business value through applied technology and one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. For more information go to www.lhotka.net.

Keith Ward

Ward has been a print and online journalist for more than 18 years. In 1999, after receiving his Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification on Windows NT 4.0, he worked in the data center for a Fortune 500 company as an NT applications specialist. Following his stint in IT, he re-entered the field of journalism to combine his love of reporting and computers to become a technology writer. Shortly thereafter, Ward earned an MCSE certification on Windows 2000 Server. During his time with 1105 Media, he’s held the posts of online news editor and senior editor of MCP Magazine, editor of Redmond magazine, and editor of Virtualization Review.

Keynote Speakers

Dave Mendlen

Dave Mendlen is the Senior Director of Developer Marketing. Prior to this role, he served as the speech writer for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. In his time at Microsoft, he was the Director of Web Services strategy in the Developer Platform and Evangelism division at Microsoft responsible for driving Web Services excitement and standards across the industry. Recently he was the Director of Windows Product Management responsible for the marketing of Windows XP Home, Pro, Tablet PC and Windows XP Media Center Edition. He started at Microsoft in the Developer division and served as the lead product planner on .NET and Visual Studio .NET driving a team to bring web services and .NET to millions of developers.

Tim Huckaby

Tim Huckaby is currently focused on RIA & Rich Client Technologies like Silverlight, WPF, VSTO, Surface, and Windows 7 and the Multi-touch capabilities that these .NET technologies share. He has been called a “Pioneer of the Smart Client Revolution” by the press. Tim has been awarded multiple times for the highest rated Keynote and technical presentations for Microsoft and numerous other technology conferences around the world by Microsoft Corporation. Tim has done Keynotes and Technical Session presentations on Microsoft Technologies at technology events all over the world and is consistently rated in the top 10% of all speakers at these events. Tim has done keynote demos for numerous Microsoft executives including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Tim founded InterKnowlogy, experts in Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Platforms, in 1999 and has 25+ years experience including serving on a Microsoft server product team as a development lead on an architecture team. Tim is a Microsoft Regional Director, an MVP and serves on multiple Microsoft councils and boards.

Conference Speakers

Todd Anglin

Todd Anglin is Chief Evangelist for Telerik, a leading provider of development tools and UI components for .NET. Before joining Telerik, he worked for a large Fortune 200 financial services company where he learned the way of the “Enterprise” – big budgets, big projects, legacy systems, and incessant measurement. He now leverages this Enterprise experience to help Telerik make components that make the lives of all developers as easy as possible. Todd is an active author and speaker in the .NET community, focusing on web development technologies, a Microsoft MVP, founder and President of the North Houston .NET Users Group, and author. www.telerik.com

Jason Bock

Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic (http://www.magenic.com), a Microsoft MVP (C#), and an INETA (http://www.ineta.org) speaker. He 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 "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the Twin Cities Code Camp (http://www.twincitiescodecamp.com) and runs the Twin Cities Languages User Group (http://www.twincitieslanguagesusergroup.com). Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.

Robert Boedigheimer

Web Application Architect, Schwans Shared Services, LLC

Robert Boedigheimer works for Schwans Shared Services, LLC providing business solutions with web technologies and leads Robert Boedigheimer Consulting, LLC. Robert has been designing and developing web sites for the past 15 years including the early days of ASP and ASP.NET. He is a columnist for aspalliance.com, an ASP.NET MVP, an author, an "Early Achiever" MCSD for .NET with C#, an MCPD: Web with C#, MCPD: ASP.NET 3.5, and a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Robert has spoken at industry conferences including the Heartland Developers Conference, DevLink, DevTeach, Tulsa Tech Fest, DevWeek, TechEd, AJAXWorld, and numerous national and international Visual Studio Live! events.

Omid Bayani

Chief Business Officer, co-founder, Code Fluent Entities

Omid oversees several areas of CodeFluent Entities such as program management, presales and projects delivery. He is also in charge of developing the ecosystem around CodeFluent Entities, both at the national and international level. Graduated from Institute National des Télécommunications (Telecom INT), Omid Bayani spent 10 years in the IT industry. After working at Digital, he spent six years at Microsoft as a consultant in the e-Business group before becoming a partner sales representative dedicated to the Telecommunications sector..

Miguel Castro

Architect, IDesign

Miguel Castro is an architect with IDesign with over 22 years of experience in the software industry. He’s a Microsoft MVP, member of the INETA Speakers Bureau, and ASP Insider. With a Microsoft background that goes all the way back to VB 1.0 (and QuickBasic in fact), Miguel has spoken at numerous user groups, code camps, and conferences throughout the US and overseas. He has also been featured on the technology talk shows, .NET Rocks, .NET Rocks-TV, Microsoft’s ARCast (Architecture Podcast), and The Polymorphic Podcast on numerous occasions. He specializes in architecture and development consulting and training using Microsoft technologies. Miguel is also a regular author with CoDe Magazine.

Danilo Diaz

Danilo Diaz, aka Dani, is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's Mid-Atlantic State district. In this role, he helps developers understand Microsoft's product offerings and strategy. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Perficient Philadelphia where he helped establish their Mobility Practice. Dani has over 8 years of experience in the IT industry. His ability to identify and utilize the right blend of technologies to solve business needs has been an asset on all projects he has worked on. Dani's first .NET project was a Web-based eLearning application which was built on ASP.NET 1.0 Beta 2. As a consultant he has served the roles of system architect, technical lead, developer and mentor on various large and small projects. He has worked on SOA-based applications, Web applications, Windows applications and mobile systems. Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation. Blog: http://www.smallandmighty.net

Gus Emery

Gus Emery is a Principal Consultant with Tech-Pro a Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. Gus has over fifteen years experience architecting and implementing highly-scalable ASP.Net applications and distributed n-tiered applications across a broad array of industries within the Twin Cities area. Gus has been working with Visual Basic since v3.0 and .Net since Beta #1, and loves to seek out new and exciting technologies to serve his customers technological needs!

Jon Flanders

Jon is a member of the technical staff at MCW, where he focuses on connected systems technologies. Jon is most at home spelunking, trying to figure out how things work from the inside out. Jon is the author of RESTful.NET from O'Reilly,as well as Essential ASP for Addison-Wesley, and was a co-author of Mastering Visual Studio.NET for O'Reilly. Jon's current major interest is helping people to understand the advantages of REST and how REST connects to products like SharePoint 2010. You can read his blog at http://www.rest-ful.net/

Ken Getz

Ken Getz is a developer, writer, and trainer, working as a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC. In addition to writing hundreds of technical articles over the past fifteen years, he is lead courseware author for AppDev (http://www.appdev.com). 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, and continues to write technical articles. Ken is a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau, and speaks regularly at a large number of industry events, including 1105 Media’s Visual Studio Live!, and Microsoft’s Tech-Ed.

Billy Hollis

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. www.DotNetMasters.com

Deborah Kurata

Deborah Kurata is cofounder of InStep Technologies Inc., a professional consulting firm that focuses on turning your business vision into reality using Microsoft .NET technologies. She has over 15 years of experience in architecting, designing, and developing successful applications. Deborah has authored several books, including the "Doing Objects in Visual Basic" series (Addison-Wesley), "Best Kept Secrets in .NET" (Apress) and "Doing Web Development: Client-Side Techniques" (Apress). Deborah speaks at conferences such as Visual Studio Live!, DevDays, and TechEd. For her work in support of software development and software developers, she has been recognized with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. After a hard day of coding and taking care of her family, Deborah enjoys blowing stuff up (on the XBox of course).

Vishwas Lele

Vishwas Lele is an AIS Chief Technology Officer and is responsible for the company vision and execution of creating business solutions using .NET technologies. Vishwas brings close to 20 years of experience and thought leadership to his position, and has been at AIS for 13 years. A noted industry speaker and author, Vishwas is the Microsoft Regional Director for the Washington, D.C. area and a member of the Connected Systems Division Advisors group. Additionally, Vishwas has received an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Solution Architecture award for 2009.

Leonard Lobel

Leonard Lobel is the chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of Sleek Technologies, Inc., a New York–based development shop with an early adopter philosophy toward new technologies. He is also a principal consultant at twentysix New York, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Programming since 1979, Lenni specializes in Microsoft-based solutions, with experience that spans a variety of business domains, including publishing, financial, wholesale/retail, health care, and e-commerce. Lenni has served as chief architect and lead developer for various organizations, ranging from small shops to high-profile clients. He is also a consultant, trainer, and a frequent speaker at local usergroup meetings, Visual Studio Live!, SQL PASS, and other industry conferences. Lenni is also lead author in the new MS Press book "Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008". He can be reached at [email protected].

Wallace McClure

Wallace B. "Wally" McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1991. He has done consulting and development for such organizations as The United States Department of Education, Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. Wally has been working with the .NET Framework since the first public alpha in the summer of 2000. Wally McClure specializes in building applications that have large numbers of users and large amounts of data, which is a natural fit for Windows Azure as well as user interface specific technologies, such as AJAX, and now the iPhone. He is a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, member of the national INETA Speaker’s Bureau, author of seven programming books, and a partner in Scalable Development, Inc.

Orville McDonald

As a product manager in Microsoft’s developer marketing group, Orville McDonald manages the Visual Studio for Windows Phone and Visual Studio LightSwitch products. Prior to this role, Orville helped develop privacy and security technology for Windows Live ID which is used by half a billion people. In his free time Orville is completing his MBA at the University of Washington.

Jeffrey McManus

Jeffrey McManus is a developer and entrepeneur. He co-founded and led the Yahoo! Developer Network team. From 2003-2005 he did a similar job for eBay. Before that, he worked as a technology consultant, speaker and author, writing six books on software development on the Microsoft platform. Jeffrey has expertise in platform businesses, web services technology, and open source, particularly as it applies to incumbent businesses. He's currently dividing his time between a consultancy, Platform Associates, which helps platform technology businesses create products and take them to market, and various platform products including the document-sharing site Approver.com and the open-source customer feedback platform Tinypug.

Brian Peek

Brian is a Microsoft C# MVP who has been actively developing in .NET since its early betas in 2000, and who has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies and platforms for even longer. Along with .NET, Brian is particularly skilled in the languages of C, C++ and assembly language for a variety of CPUs. He is also well-versed in a wide variety of technologies including web development, document imaging, GIS, graphics, game development, and hardware interfacing. Brian has a strong background in developing applications for the health-care industry, as well as developing solutions for portable devices, such as tablet PCs and PDAs. Additionally, Brian has co-authored the book "Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More" published O'Reilly. He previously co-authored the book "Debugging ASP.NET" published by New Riders. Brian is also an author for MSDN's Coding4Fun website. You can reach Brian via his blog at http://www.brianpeek.com/.

David Platt

David S. Platt teaches Programming .NET at Harvard University Extension School and at companies all over the world. His magnum opus, Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2007, www.whysoftwaresucks.com), points out ways in which software MUST improve if it’s to accompany humanity into the twenty-first century. He is famous for his engaging presentation style. "He's the only guy I know that can actually make a talk on COM's apartment threading model funny," said one student. Microsoft named him a Software Legend in 2002.He is the author of eleven programming books. His Introducing Microsoft .NET from Microsoft Press introduced thousands of programmers to that environment. Even today, 4 years after itsmost recent release, it is outselling Tom Clancy's Every Man a Tiger on Amazon.com, which tells you what kind of geeks buy their books there. Dave holds the Master of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College. He did his undergraduate work at Colgate University. When he finishes working, he spends his free time working some more. He wonders whether he should tape down two of his daughter's fingers so she learns how to count in octal. He lives in Ipswich, MA.

Brian Randell

Brian A. Randell is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC. For over 20 years, Brian has  been building software solutions and educating his fellow developers. Brian spends his time teaching Microsoft technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and SharePoint 2010, and consulting worldwide for Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, state and local governments, and small businesses. Brian enjoys helping people get the most out of their software. He does this through training for MCW Technologies and speaking at events such as Visual Studio Live!, Tech•Ed, and the PDC. In addition, Brian shares through the written word. Brian currently writes the Team System column for MSDN Magazine.

Walt Ritscher

Walt Ritscher has trained thousands of corporate developers during the last fourteen 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. Walt is currently consulting and teaching .NET, Silverlight and WPF classes for Wintellect. Walt's 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 —is currently a Microsoft MVP, and a member of the Silverlight Insiders and WPF Disciples. As a web programmer he has worked numerous projects including; EPA sites and the Microsoft Community Starter Kit.

Michael Stiefel

Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals.

As a member of an OASIS Technical Committee he helped develop a core SOA Reference Model and related Reference Architectures.He was a Lecturer in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his research and teaching focus was understanding how people build mental models in order to solve problems. As Adjunct faculty, Stiefel has taught graduate and undergraduate software engineering courses at Northeastern University and Framingham State University. Michael Stiefel's education is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Interdisciplinary Ph.D degree in Nuclear Engineering, Political Science, and History of Technology; M.S. in Nuclear Engineering; and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is an active member of the IEEE Consultants Network.

Paul Yuknewicz

Paul is a Senior Program Manager Lead for the Visual Studio product group at Microsoft. His team designs and builds the tools used to make application development faster and more productive. This includes tools for data access, Windows Azure, Sharepoint, Office, and LightSwitch. Paul has worked on many aspects of Visual Studio .NET since the time it was created ten years ago. Outside of work Paul enjoys his time with friends and family and he can sometimes be seen playing lead guitar in his rock cover band.