Miguel A. Castro, Infotek Consulting Group, Inc.
Miguel A. Castro is a .NET consultant, author, speaker and trainer with over 20 years of IT experience with a background in full automation solutions encompassing all aspects of a project’s life cycle, including data gathering, architecture, design, development, documentation and training. He is a Microsoft MVP in the area of Visual Developer C#, recently awarded for 2005, and president of InfoTek Consulting Group, Inc., a provider of .NET consulting services to clients in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area.

Scott Cate, myKB.com, Inc.
Scott Cate is the President of myKB.com, Inc., in Scottsdale, Arizona. myKB.com is a technology company specializing is commercial ASP.NET applications. His product line includes myKB.com (Knowledge Base Software), kbAlertz.com (Microsoft Knowledge Base Notifications) and EasySearchASP.net (a Pluggable Search Engine for ASP.NET sites). Scott also runs AZGroups.com (Arizona .NET User Groups), one of the largest and most active user group communities in the country, and is a member of ASPInsiders.com, a group devoted to giving early feedback to the Microsoft ASP.NET Team. Scott has also been awarded the ASP.NET MVP for three years in a row, from 2004-2006. In addition, Scott has co-authored an AJAX book titled Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET to be released in the summer of 2006 and the non-fiction novel Surveillance and can be found at http://surveillance-the-novel.com.

Robert Daigneau, Monster.com
Rob Daigneau has over seventeen years experience designing and implementing enterprise-class applications for a broad array of industries from manufacturing, to financial services, to retail and wholesale. Rob is currently the Director of Architecture for Monster.com, one of the most visited web sites in the world.

Benjamin Day, Benjamin Day Consulting
Benjamin Day is an independent consultant specializing in the design and development of applications with Visual Studio Team System.  He is a Microsoft MVP for C#, conference speaker, and leads the Beantown.NET User Group.  Ben also provides consulting and training on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server and is a member of the Visual Studio Team System Customer Advisory Council at Microsoft.  When not developing software, Ben plays piano with a Boston-based jazz trio and is an enthusiastic restaurant, food, beer and wine buff.  

Mark D’Urso
Mark D’Urso is a lead developer on the next generation online content delivery and rendering systems for MSDN and TechNet.  Recently, he lead the adoption of key technologies such as ASP.Net AJAX and Script# for the MSDN wiki.  Mark has been with Microsoft since 2000 and during that time has authored a variety asp.net based rendering frameworks used throughout the Microsoft.com suite of sites.  As a developer, he considers himself a user of both MSDN and TechNet and is dedicated to improving the user experience and streamlining developer productivity. 

Ken Getz, MCW Technologies
Ken Getz is a developer, writer and trainer, working as a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC, a Microsoft Solution Provider. He is a lead courseware author and trainer for AppDev (http://www.appdev.com), and has written and presented video courses covering C# and Visual Basic 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, ADO.NET 2.0 and more. 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. Ken is a technical editor for Advisor Publications’ VB.NET Technical Journal, and he's a columnist for both MSDN Magazine and CoDe magazine. Ken speaks regularly at a large number of industry events, including Advisor Media’s Advisor Live events, FTP’s VSLive, and Microsoft’s Tech-Ed.

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.

D. Britton Johnston, Product Unit Manager, Data Programmability Tools, Microsoft

Britt is responsible for defining the data access strategy for the Microsoft Windows platform primarily through the SQL Server product line, the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.  Britt is responsible for the ADO.NET, XML Tools and data access technologies that support SQL Server such as ODBC, OLEDB and JDBC.  Prior to joining Microsoft, Britt was CTO at Progress Software Corporation and was General Manager of the PeerDirect Distributed Enterprise product line that pioneered Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) through the use of Database replication integrated with p2p networks.  Johnston co-founded NuSphere Corporation, a pioneer in the open source database marketplace with MySQL and PHP, creating the first commercially supported LAMP stack for Windows in the late 90’s.  Johnston was Director of Database Development at Progress Software Corporation in the 90’s where he redesigned the storage engine for the Progress RDBMS.  In the 80’s Johnston worked on Rdb database cluster technology and RdbStar which pioneered portable database and distributed query technology at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Deborah Kurata, InStep Technologies
Deborah is a professional software architect, designer, and developer. She provides consulting services in the areas of project architecture and design, software development (Windows and smart-client applications), and mentoring services. She is frequently brought in to assist existing teams with establishing best practices and defining an appropriate architecture and application framework. Deborah has authored several books, including the Doing Objects in Visual Basic series (SAMS), Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Apress) and Doing Web Development: Client-Side Techniques (Apress), and is currently working on Doing Objects in VB 2005 (Addison-Wesley). She also writes for MSDN and CoDe magazine (www.code-magazine.com).

Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
Rockford Lhotka is the author of the Expert VB 2005 Business Objects and Expert C# 2005 Business Objects books 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.

David Lowe, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation
David Lowe is Senior Product Manager for Windows Server with Microsoft Corporation. In this role, he manages worldwide evaluation and deployment programs for Windows Server 2008. David has been with Microsoft since 2001, and in this time he has also been Senior Product Manager for Security and IT Professional portfolios with Microsoft Learning.

Prior to joining Microsoft, David was Senior Lecturer in Internet Technologies at the Centre for Advanced Technology Training in Dublin, Ireland, where he specialized in Web development and XML. David holds a Bachelor of Science degree from University College, Dublin, and he is the author of "BizTalk Server: The Complete Reference", published by Osborne-McGraw Hill.

Dave Mendlen, Director of Visual Studio Product Management, Microsoft Corporation
Dave Mendlen is the Director of Visual Studio Product Management and is responsible for the marketing of developer tools at Microsoft. 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 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.

Chris Menegay, Notion Solutions, Inc.
Chris Menegay is a Development Process Consultant for Notion Solutions, Inc., a consulting and training firm specializing in software development process and Visual Studio Team System. He has been working with Team System full-time since late 2004. Chris has obtained a broad understanding of information technology by sharing best practices with the client companies he has worked with over the past 10 years. As a consultant, he has served 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. He has written white papers and articles on Team System for MSDN and MSDN Magazine. Chris is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Microsoft Regional Director and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau.

Mark Miller
|Mark Miller is a C# MVP 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

Brian A. Randell, MCW Technologies
Brian A. Randell is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, LLC. Brian spends his time between teaching Microsoft .NET -based technologies to developers, working with new and emerging technologies like Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System, and consulting worldwide for clients such as Microsoft, American Honda, DELL and others. Brian enjoys helping people get the most out of their software. He does this through training, consulting and speaking at events such as VSLive!, Tech•Ed and the PDC. In addition, Brian shares through the written word. He is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic and has written articles for MSDN Magazine and Microsoft. He is also a member of Pluralsight's technical staff and author of Pluralsight's Applied Team System course. Reach Brian via his blog at http://www.mcwtech.com/cs/blogs/brianr/. 

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 'early adopter' .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.

Richard Hale Shaw, Richard Hale Shaw Group
VSLive! Dallas Conference Chair
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! and the Black Belt tracks 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 Managed C++. Richard is a member of the INETA (http://www.ineta.org/) speakers bureau, and for his work supporting C#/.NET software developers, he's been recognized by Microsoft as a C# MVP since 2004. You can reach him at www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com.

Paul Sheriff, PDSA, Inc.
Paul D. Sheriff is the President of PDSA, Inc., a Microsoft Partner in Southern California. Paul acts as the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California assisting the local Microsoft offices with Developer Days and several of their large events each year. Paul has authored five books on .NET and two on SharePoint in the form of eBooks that can be purchased at the PDSA web site at www.pdsa.com/ebooks. Paul can be reached via email at PSheriff@pdsa.com.

Michael Stiefel, Reliable Software, Inc.
Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc., is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves: Training in service oriented and distributed applications development, software best practices, in .NET, C#, Web services, C++ and SQL Server. Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring and growth management. Design and implementation service based applications including Web services. Requirements analysis, project plan development, and design document development. Expert Witness for intellectual property cases. He is currently a member of the OASIS Technical Committee developing a core SOA Reference Model and related Reference Architectures. In July 2006, Stiefel was named a Microsoft Visual Developer - Solutions Architect MVP. You can find more information about him at www.reliablesoftware.com.

Allen Wagner,
Allen Wagner is a developer on the next generation online content delivery and rendering systems for MSDN and TechNet. He has been with Microsoft since 1995 in a variety of roles and teams, ranging from DirectPlay through Windows Media Player to MSDN, where he’s been a developer for more than 6 years. Recently, he has been focused on performance enhancements for the MSDN and TechNet TOCs.