Conference Chair

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. You can contact him at .

Speakers

Scott Allen, OdeToCode
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.

Andrew Brust, Citigate Hudson
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.

Adam Gallant, Microsoft Canada
Adam Gallant is Microsoft Developer Specialist who focuses on reaching out to the developer community through his work with a broad and diverse range of audiences including enterprise, small and medium business, user groups, game developers and hobbyists. Adam has been dedicated to the technical and practical implementation of Microsoft .NET technology throughout his time at Microsoft.

Barry Gervin, ObjectSharp
Barry Gervin is a Principal Consultant with ObjectSharp Consulting. Barry, a technical leader with over 15 years experience, has helped many development teams architect and build large-scale mission critical applications. Barry is skilled in the Architecture and Development of Distributed Applications and Databases. Some of his notable recent work is aimed at establishing best practices for .NET development. He has been deeply involved with Microsoft's .NET platform and is a convert from the PowerBuilder development community.

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.

Jackie Goldstein, Renaissance Computer Systems
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

Derek Hatchard
Derek Hatchard is a Microsoft Regional Director and the lead software architect at Ardent Development Solutions, a consulting company (based in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada) that specializes in development using .NET and other Microsoft technologies. Derek also writes content regularly for developers including presentations, demos, articles, and book chapters. Derek has degrees in computer science and psychology and holds MCSD and MCAD certifications. You can reach him by email at or via his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/derekh/ .

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
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.

Chris Kinsman, Vergent Software
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 courses 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 conferences 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.

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.

Kevin McNeish
Kevin McNeish is President and Chief Software Architect of Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc, and a Microsoft .NET/C# MVP.  He is a speaker with MSDN Canada Speaker's Bureau and a well known speaker and trainer throughout North America and Europe. He is co-author of the book "Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET", has authored many articles for CoDe magazine and the Universal Thread Magazine and has also been interviewed on the .NET Rocks! Internet Radio Show. He is the Chief Software Architect of the Mere Mortals .NET Framework and spends about half his time on the road training and mentoring companies to build well-designed, high-performance .NET applications. You can reach him at www.oakleafsd.com.

Russ Nemhauser
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.

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.

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.

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 U.S. providing training at corporations, universities and developer conferences .He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market. Walt’s industry expertise has placed him on various advisory boards including technology advisor for the National Workforce Center for Emerging Technologies.

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!, 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.

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.

Scott Watermasysk, Telligent Systems
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.

Terry Weiss, Mentis Solutions