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 .

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 .

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
Data Access Virtual Track Technical Chair
Andrew Brust 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 regular, highly rated speaker at VSLive! and other 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.

Conference Speakers

Tom Barnaby, Intertech
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.

John deVadoss, Microsoft
John deVadoss is a solutions architect and director of the Solutions Architecture team with the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft. His team is chartered with working with leading-edge technology adopters in the Enterprise, GSI, and ISV space to generate architecture guidance and foster platform adoption. During this past fiscal year, John's team was focused on SOA, in particular on best practices and design principles for service aggregation (smart clients), entity aggregation and identity management among others. His team also collaborates with the patterns & practices group at Microsoft on a number of projects. John has 14 years of experience in the enterprise space having worked with customers and partners such as Reuters, Thomson, Bloomberg, ETrade, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Avanade, and Accenture among others. His areas of interest include data and metadata management and systems management but most importantly, he is concerned with driving business value from technology investments.

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. You can reach Ken at , www.mcwtech.com, or at www.developershandbook.com.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft
Scott Guthrie co-founded the ASP.NET Team, and leads the design team responsible for architecting the product. His individual technical contributions include: ASP.NET Web Forms Page Architecture, ASP.NET Web Services Infrastructure, ASP.NET Compilation System, ASP.NET Distributed Session State Infrastructure, ASP.NET Deployment Architecture, ASP.NET Reliability System, and the ASP.NET HTTP Runtime Architecture. Prior to ASP.NET, Scott was a member of the Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows NT development teams.

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.

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.

Don Kiely
Don Kiely, MVP, MCSD, is a senior technology consultant, building custom applications as well as providing business and technology consulting services. His development work involves tools such as SQL Server, Visual Basic, C#, ASP.NET, and Microsoft Office. He writes regularly for several trade journals, and trains developers in database and .NET technologies. You can reach Don at .

Dwayne Lamb, Visual Byte Inc.
Dwayne Lamb is a 15-year veteran of the computer industry and an experienced technology instructor, writer, presenter and developer. Dwayne is the President and a Principal Consultant for Visual Byte Inc., a Toronto-based company focusing on custom mobility solutions and consumer mobile applications. Through his work at Visual Byte, and his active involvement in the developer and user communities, he has become a leader and industry specialist in the area of mobile application development and design and has been recognized by Microsoft as a Mobile Device MVP. Dwayne has authored several articles on mobility topics that have been published on a variety of web sites and hosts a number of developer-focused sites of his own. You can reach him by email at or visit the Visual Byte web site at www.visualbyte.com. You can also visit www.vbdogs.net or www.mobidogs.com to find helpful developer information.

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.

Dave Mendlen, Microsoft
Dave Mendlen is the Director of Web Services Technical Marketing in the Developer Platform and Evangelism division at Microsoft. Previously he served as the communication manager for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. He started at Microsoft in the Developer division and served as the lead product planner on Visual Studio .NET.

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.

John Papa, Lancelot Web Solutions
Johnny Papa is the VP of IT at MJM Investigations, a leading private investigation firm in Raleigh, NC. Johnny can regularly be found speaking at high-tech events such as VSLive! He has also published several technical books, including Professional ADO RDS 2.5 with ASP 3.0, on how to implement leading-edge technologies. You can reach him at .

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. Contact him at .

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.

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.

Andrew Troelsen, Intertech
Andrew Troelsen is an Intertech partner and Vice President of Training and Technology. With Intertech, Andrew teaches and mentors leading organizations in America on .NET including NASA, Microsoft, Honeywell, and The Mayo Clinic. Prior to joining Intertech, Andrew was a senior programmer working on cross-platform game and multimedia titles for Mattel (then Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation--MECC) and Thomson Learning (West Group). Andrew is the international best-selling author of C# and the .NET Platform.

Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corporation
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.