Conference Speakers
Conference Chairs
Keith Pleas, Guided Design
Smart Client Live!
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 .
Andrew Brust, Citigate Hudson
SQL Live!
Andrew Brust is Chief, New Technology at Citigate Hudson, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in New York City. Andrew 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 highly rated speaker at 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. He can be reached at .
Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
Black Belt Virtual Track
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.
Conference Speakers
Scott Allen, OdeToCode
Scott Allen 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.
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 and Microsoft¹s Visual DevCon 2005.
David Bost, Solution Partners
Dave Bost is the Director of Technology for Solution Partners, a Chicago-based consulting company and Microsoft Solution Provider Partner. From the earlier days of Visual Basic and COM to the present times with .NET and distributed architectures, Dave has spent the past 10 years specializing in designing and implementing Microsoft software solutions. Dave is a significant contributor to the Chicago .NET development community and has been a frequent speaker at some of the industry's leading conferences. You can keep up with Dave on his blog at http://www.davebost.com.
Peter DeBetta, Wintellect
Peter DeBetta is the resident SQL Server trainer and consultant for Wintellect. Peter develops software using SQL Server, .NET, and other technologies. He also teaches SQL Server Programming courses and speaks at various conferences around the world about SQL Server, including SQL Server 2005 Roadshow, SQL PASS Community Summit, DevTeach, Devscovery, Microsoft's SQL Server Summit, and Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 DevCon. Peter has written courseware, books and articles on the subject, including articles for MSDN Magazine and a new Microsoft Press book entitled Introducing SQL Server 2005 for Developers.
Debra Dove, Microsoft
As Program Manager for data access in the SQL Server product group at Microsoft, Debra focuses on SQL Server data access technologies, such as SQL Native Client and ADO.NET, and evangelizing the use of data access enabled applications against SQL Server. She has been involved with data access and database replication technologies for over ten years. She has co-authored several books and white papers, including Jet Database Engine Programmer’s Guide, Access Power Programming, Multi-User Considerations in Data Synchronization for SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition 3.0, and Database Replication in Microsoft Jet 4.0.
Ketan Duvedi, Microsoft
Ketan Duvedi is a developer in the SQL Server Relational Engine team at Microsoft and has been working on SQL Server for the last 5 years. His areas of expertise is the execution engine inside the SQL Server particularly plan caching, compile/execution loop, query parameterization, recompilation and eventing. Before working in SQL Server he was a developer in the Exchange Server team at Microsoft. He completed his masters in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and now lives in Seattle.
Stephen Forte, Corzen, Inc
Stephen Forte is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a Manhattan (USA) based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region. He speaks regularly at industry conferences like Tech*Ed, North Africa Developers Conference and other conferences around the world. He has written several books on database development and currently is writing the MS Press book SQL Server 2005 Core Developers Guide . Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder and CTO of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group.
Sam Gentile, Adesso Systems
Sam Gentile is internationally recognized for his overall .NET knowledge and was recently acknowledged by Microsoft as an MVP for C#/.NET. He is also an INETA Speaker having delivered .NET training to user groups and companies all over the US. Sam is now the Chief .NET Architect at Adesso Systems. In this role, he is responsible for all architectural and design aspects of the future line of .NET based products, working with .NET based technologies, present and future.
Cathi Gero, Prenia Corp.
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, 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.
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.
Robert Hurlbut, Hurlbut Consulting
Robert Hurlbut is an independent software architect/developer and consultant and owner of Hurlbut Consulting, Inc. He is also a Microsoft MVP for Security Development. Robert specializes in application security, distributed architectures, and database architecture and development. He has spoken at industry conferences, including WIN-DEV, New England Code Camp, Heartland Developers Conference, and DevTeach. He has a .NET blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/rhurlbut.
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
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.
Maxim Karpov, Faith Interactive
Maxim V. Karpov is a software architect, an independent consultant, and a mentor. He is completely sold on the idea that design patterns provide developers with a universal language for communication and a platform for developing superior applications. The majority of his time is spent helping corporations architect their enterprise applications based on best practices and commonly used Design Patterns. When he is not developing, he teaches .NET developers worldwide how to unleash the power of object-oriented programming in everyday application development. He is also well-recognized in the SharePoint community for his contributions to various open-source projects.
Christian Kleinerman, Microsoft
Christian Kleinerman has close to 10 years of experience working with SQL Server — the last five as part of the SQL Server development team in Redmond, WA. He is currently a Program Manager in the relational engine team where he has worked on a variety of features and technologies. Before Microsoft he worked on eCommerce Web site development and previously was co-founder of a development company specializing on scheduling software.
Vishwas Lele, Applied Informations Sciences
Vishwas Lele is a Principal Architect at Applied Information Sciences where he has been involved in the development of .NET based applications for a number of clients. He regularly conducts .NET classes including security seminars for developers. Vishwas has been a speaker at a number of developer events and has also authored many magazine articles and white papers on the .NET technology. Vishwas serves as the Microsoft Regional Director for the Washington DC area.
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.
Chris Menegay, Notion Solutions, Inc.
Chris Menegay is a Principal Consultant for Notion Solutions, Inc. — a training and consulting firm specializing in Visual Studio Team System. He has been helping clients develop business applications for over 10 years. Chris has obtained a broad understanding of information technology by sharing best practices with the client companies he as worked with over the past 10 years. As a consultant, he has had the opportunity to serve 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. Chris is also a Microsoft MVP and a Microsoft Regional Director.
Mark Miller, Developer Express
Mark Miller is a high-speed coder with strong expertise in decoupled design, plug-in architectures, and great UI. Mark is Chief Architect of the IDE Tools division at Developer Express, and is the visionary force behind productivity tools like CodeRush and Refactor!, as well as the DXCore extensibility layer for Visual Studio. Mark has been writing software for over two decades.
Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
Russ Nemhasuer 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 write for several magazines and online software community sites.
Ted Neward, Independent Consultant
Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and Web service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Northern California area with his wife, two sons, two cats, and eight PCs.
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.
Shankar Pal, Microsoft
Shankar Pal is a Program Manager in the SQL Server engine team. He works on programmability areas with special focus on XML data processing, data modeling and data management. He has published papers in MSDN Online on the XML technology and in conferences such as Very Large Data Base and ACM SIGMOD, and works extensively with customers.Prior to the XML focus, Shankar was a development lead in SQL Server working on meta-data management, and a co-inventor of the SOAP protocol. He has many patents to his credit arising out of his contributions at Microsoft Corporation.
John Papa, ASPSOFT
John Papa, a Sr Consultant with ASPSOFT, has been working with Microsoft distributed architectures for 10 years and has developed with .NET since its early pre-beta days. He is a baseball fanatic who spends most of his summer nights rooting for the Yankees with his family and his faithful dog, Kadi. John has authored or co-authored several books on ADO, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server, is the author of a the Data Points column in MSDN Magazine and can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive. You can catch John on his blog at http://codebetter.com/blogs/john.papa
Robert Patton, Optimum Technology
Robert A. Patton (MCDBA, MCSD, MCSE+I, MCP+I) is a Senior Consultant for Optimum Technology, a public sector technology services company in Ohio, specializing in Microsoft Windows .NET solutions. He is a frequent speaker and has authored and edited several books, including SQL Server 2000.Net.
Roy Pereira, Harris Corporation
Roy Pereira is a Senior Software Developer for the Harris Corporation. He is responisble for integration on a complex .NET based research and development initiative. Previously Roy has worked for Siemens Logistics and Assemblies Global Research and Development branch where he was responsible for designing the next generation Corporate Engineering Toolset, integrating .NET client applications with back end ERP and PLM systems. He has been a speaker at the Autodesk Univeristy conference and also teaches a class on Multiplayer Game Programming using manageged DirectX at Ferris State University. He has also served as an officer in the Singapore Armed Forces.
Jennifer Perret, Microsoft
As Program Manager for data access in the SQL Server product group at Microsoft, Jennifer focuses on SQL Server data access technologies, such as SQL Native Client, MDAC, and ADO.NET, and evangelizing the use of data access enabled applications against SQL Server. She is currently the PM owner for BID – Data Access Built In Diagnostics, SQL Server Compatibility, and a few other key projects. In her ten year career at Microsoft she has successfully pulled the ‘hat-trick’ by working in all three roles; Test, Development and now as a PM. Throughout these ten years she has been able to work for Access, JET Database, JET Replication, and now the SQL Server division.
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 A. 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.
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 Œearly adopter¹ .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.
Aleksandar Seovic, Solutions for Human Capital, Inc.
Aleksandar Seovic is a Managing Director at Solutions for Human Capital, Inc. – a software outsourcing company specializing in enterprise document and content management, where he has lead development effort on a number of engagements for Fortune 500 corporations, mostly in pharmaceutical and financial services industry. Aleksandar is also a co-lead for Spring.NET, an open source framework for enterprise application development, and a lead developer for Web, AOP and Services modules of the framework.
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.
Payam Shodjai, Microsoft
Payam Shodjai is a Product Manager for Web Services Strategy in the Developer and Platform Division at Microsoft Corp. He is responsible for worldwide technical evangelism of Microsoft’s Web services offerings, including “Indigo” and Web Services Enhancements (WSE). He moved to the Web Services Strategy team from the Indigo product team, where he was responsible for driving WS-* security interoperability across a variety of Web services implementations.
Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft
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.
Bill Vaughn, Beta V Corp.
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.
Brian Welcker, Microsoft
Brian Welcker is Group Program Manager for SQL Server Reporting Services, part of the SQL Server product group. His team is focused on delivering the premier managed and ad-hoc enterprise reporting platform as part of SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 as well as delivering developer reporting components for Visual Studio 2005. Previously, Brian was the lead program manager for SQL Server Meta Data Services as well as a technical evangelist in Microsoft's developer relations group. He joined Microsoft eight years ago after working for a company building software for hospitals and doctor's offices. Brian resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife and 2 children.
Dan Winn, Microsoft
Dan Winn is a Program Manager in the SQL Server Relational Engine team at Microsoft. In his 5 years with the team he has worked on a variety of technologies including the Dynamic Management Views, SQL Trace, SQL/CLR, Visual Studio Integration and T-SQL Exception Handling. Hailing originally from the east coast, Dan got a degree in Computer Science from Princeton University and now lives in Seattle.
Roger Wolter, Microsoft
Roger Wolter has close to 30 years experience in the computer industry – the last 7 with Microsoft. He is currently a Program manager on the SQL Server team specializing in SQL Server Service Broker and SQL Server Express. His projects at Microsoft have included COM+, SQLXML, the Soap Toolkit, SQL Server Service Broker and SQL Express.
