Conference Chair

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 .

Speakers

Scott Allen,
Scott has more than 12 years of experience in delivering commercial products across a wide range of technologies — from 8 bit embedded devices to highly scalable Web applications for Fortune 50 clients. Over the last three years, he has been using .NET and SQL Server technologies to build business intelligence on top of clinical data warehouses.

Tom Barnaby,
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.

Steven Borg, Independent Consultant
Steven Borg is an independent author, trainer, and consultant. A programmer since age fifteen, he was one of the first .NET adopters, and now trains and consults exclusively in .NET, Team System, and SharePoint development. In addition to a professional software development background, he has experience in applied mathematics, operations research, business process reengineering, and sales.

Cathi Gero,
Cathi Gero, C.P.A., is founder and development director of Prenia Corp., providing custom software applications, training, and architectural designing to businesses and developers. Cathi is a Microsoft C# MVP and is an active member of the .NET community. She has extensive experience developing applications using the .NET Framework, SQL Server, and Crystal Reports as well as other technologies. She is an international speaker at conferences and user groups, author of numerous articles for Microsoft, and technical editor for several .NET books. Her monthly column, “Cathi Gero’s .NET Tips” appears in Universal Thread Magazine. Most of the year Cathi travels to various companies providing onsite training, mentoring, and development experience.

Ken Getz,
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,
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

J Mel Harris,
Mel has more than 35 years of development consulting, management, and training experience spanning the marketplace from PCs to mainframe systems. His current work is with Visual Basic.NET, C#, SQL-Transact, and Visual Basic for Applications. For the past few years, Mel's time has been split between development-project mentoring and contact training/presentations. He has owned and operated his own consulting company specializing in medium-sized businesses, using desktop database systems as well as Windows and Web front-end systems for SQL server and JET databases.

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.

BJ Holtgrewe,
BJ Holtgrewe is a lead product manager for Visual Studio. He is responsible for product planning and marketing for Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. BJ came to the developer division after spending almost three years in Microsoft Research working in the Smart Personal Object Technology team creating the MSN Direct network and smart watches. Prior to joining Research he was the Senior Product Manager/Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Business Tools Division working on MapPoint. Before life at Microsoft, he was a project and design consultant and worked for software companies on the East Coast and in Europe. Even earlier in his history BJ was an avid skydiver instructor, internationally rated skydiving judge, and underwater search and recovery diver.

Rob Howard,
Rob Howard is a founder of Telligent Systems, Inc., which specializes in building high-availability and high-scale software solutions. Prior to founding Telligent, he was employed by the Microsoft where he was a member of the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 team — specifically contributing to ASP.NET.

Richard Hundhausen,
Richard Hundhausen travels and teaches Microsoft .NET technologies. As a result of constantly evangelizing .NET over the past several years, he was nominated and has become one of Microsoft's Regional Directors. When not teaching, Richard works as a principal of Accentient, a high-bandwidth software architecture and development firm, specializing in .NET, SQL Server and BizTalk solutions. Richard has co-authored two .NET books for Wiley: Programming ADO.NET and Building Web Applications with ADO.NET and XML Web Services.

Ron Jacobs,
Ron Jacobs is a Product Manager for Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices group. 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.

Michael Leworthy, Michael Leworthy is a Senior Product Manager within the Visual Studio division, with a specific focus on Visual Studio Team System. Over 5 years experience at Microsoft, and many years previously with partner, government and commercial organizations, has enabled him to spend time equally between infrastructure and developer solutions. This has provided a solid understanding of the needs of developers, knowledge workers and IT professionals in organization of all sizes. Michael attended the University of South Australia were he studied both B.Eng in Electrical Engineering and B.Sci in Computer Science.

Rockford Lhotka,
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.

Mark Michaelis,
Mark Michaelis is a software architect and trainer at Itron  Corporation.  Mark serves on several Microsoft software design review  teams including C# and VSTS. He is currently completing another C#  book, Essential C#  (Addison Wesley). When not bonding with his computer, Mark is busy with his family, exercising outdoors, or traveling  the globe.  Mark Michaelis lives in Spokane, WA and can be  contacted via his blog at

Fritz Onion,
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.

Keith Pleas, Guided Design
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.

Brian Randell,
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.

Dominic Selly,
Dominic Selly is an Intertech trainer and consultant. He is a frequent presenter at VSLive, Connections, and SD Expo conferences. Dominc is also a co-author of Visual Basic .NET at Work from Wiley. He has also been teaching developers for many years, in topics including ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, XML, Visual Basic, ASP, and SQL Server. He is the author of a five day ASP.NET course, and co-created the Web Application Development Certificate program offered at George Washington Univ. in DC.

Doug Seven,
As one of the co-founders of DotNetJunkies.com, a content- based online training resource for .NET developers, Doug Seven has been building applications with the .NET Framework since the summer of 2000. Seven is a charter member of both the INTEA Speaker's Bureau and the INTEA-LATAM Speaker's Bureau, speaking at user groups and conferences around the country. Seven has also co-authored five books related to the .NET Framework.

Richard Hale Shaw,
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++.

Paul Sheriff,
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 (). Check out Paul's new book ASP.NET Developer's Jumpstart with co-author Ken Getz.

Aaron Skonnard,
Aaron is a recognized authority on .NET, XML, and Web services technologies. Aaron is a founding partner of Pluralsight, a think-tank organization delivering in-depth technical content and training. Aaron has written numerous books and articles including the Essential XML Quick Reference (Addison Wesley, 2001), Essential XML (Addison Wesley, 2000), and his monthly column "The XML Files" in MSDN Magazine. Aaron frequently speaks at developer conferences throughout the world and is recognized by Microsoft as an MVP for his contributions to the XML Web Services community.

Prshant Sridharan,
Prashant Sridharan is the Senior Product Manager for Visual Studio. He is responsible for product planning for future versions of Visual Studio and driving the creation of development tools for enterprise customers. In previous roles at Microsoft he was the Product Manager for Visual J++ 1.1, Visual J++ 6.0, Windows CE Tools, Microsoft TV, and Visual C#. Prior to Microsoft, he was a software engineer at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, CA and the MITRE Corp. in Washington, DC.

Doug Turnure,
Doug Turnure is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Corporation, focusing on .NET technologies. He serves numerous enterprise clients as a developer, author, trainer, and occasional conference speaker. His specialties include .NET internals, memory management, and distributed communication, although he enjoys anything pertaining to .NET. Prior to joining Microsoft, he spent five years as an instructor and course author with DevelopMentor and Aggelos, Inc. Doug is based in Atlanta, GA.

Scott Watermasysk,
Scott is a senior software architect at Telligent Solutions. He is founder of the popular internet blogging technology, .Text used to run sites such as blogs.msdn.com.