Miguel Castro, Infotek Consulting Group, Inc.
Miguel 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.

During Mike’s tenure at Microsoft he managed a team of technical evangelists. In this capacity he saw Microsoft .NET transform from a vision to become reality. His team was responsible for a number of high-profile, high-scale, implementations such as the City of London traffic congestion project, as well as projects on the other end of the spectrum such as Smartphone applications.

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.

Torsten Grabs, Microsoft Corporation
Torsten works as a Program Manager for the Microsoft SQL Server Query Processor. His responsibilities currently cover a broad range of areas in SQL Server from relational data warehousing to reliability of query processing to features such as cache sync (aka query notifications). Torsten is with Microsoft SQL Server since early 2004 serving in different roles in development and program management. Torsten holds a PhD in database systems from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.

Robert Green, MCW Technologies
Robert Green is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Partner. Before joining MCW, Robert worked at Microsoft for 8 years, most recently as a Program Manager on the Visual Basic product team and previously as a Product Manager for Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual FoxPro. Prior to joining Microsoft, Robert was a Vice President and co-founder of The Information Management Group, a consulting and education services firm in Chicago. Robert has been a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user groups. Along with co-author Ken Getz, Robert co-authored AppDev’s Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Workflow Foundation courseware, and appears in the video training for these courses, as well.

Chris Kinsman, Vertafore
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. He is the Chief Architect for Vertafore, an insurance ISV. Chris has taught courses on ASP.NET in both VB.NET and C# and has extensive experience with ASP, Web Forms, Clustering, Data Access and Scalability. 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, and Building Server Controls. Contact him at ckinsman@vergentsoftware.com.

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).

Rockford 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.

Jeffrey P. McManus, eBay
Jeffrey P. McManus, Senior Manager of Developer Relations for eBay is the author of several books on software development, including Database Access with Visual Basic .NET and C# Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET.

Russ Nemhauser, Nemhauser Media
Russ Nemhauser 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 and writes for several magazines and online software community sites.

Fritz Onion, Pluralsight
Fritz Onion is a founding partner of Pluralsight, a premier Microsoft .NET training provider. Fritz is the author of Pluralsight's ASP.NET curriculum, and teaches course offerings around the world. He is the author of the highly acclaimed books Essential ASP.NET and Essential ASP.NET 2.0 (Addison Wesley).

He is a columnist for MSDN Magazine, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences including the PDC, TechEd, and VSLive!. Prior to .NET, Fritz's work focused on Windows development with C++ and COM, and has written several courses and many articles on C++, MFC, COM, and ATL. Microsoft recognizes Fritz as an MVP for his contributions to the ASP.NET community. You can read Fritz's blog at http://pluralsight.com/fritz/.

John Papa, ASPSOFT
John (C# MVP and MCAD.NET) has been working with Microsoft distributed architectures for over 10 years. He has enterprise experience architecting and developing with .NET technologies including ASP.NET as well as WebForms using both C# and VB.NET. 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 the Data Points column in MSDN Magazine and can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive.

Renato Haddad, Web Action Technology
Renato Haddad is currently the IT Director for Web Action Technology and is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Mobile Devices. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as TechEd Brazil 2002-2006, Mobility Road Show, Visual Studio Technical Conference, Mobility Seminar, Ottawa .NET Community Canada, and at Australia and New Zealand User Groups.

Renato is an Architect and Developer of the .NET Solution with experience in Brazil and Canada MVP insider in November/05 (http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpInsider_2005-11). In addition to authoring a multimedia training DVD about VS.NET 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Reporting Services, Mobile Applications, and ASP.NET with Visual Basic .NET, he’s the author of 9 books about Microsoft technologies (MS-Office and .NET).

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/. 

Rob Reinauer, Microsoft
Rob is currently Product Unit Manager for the SQL Server Engine.  In this role he has responsibility for development, test and project management for the SQL Server storage engine as well as the Security, Service Broker and SQL Server’s scale out project groups.   Rob joined Microsoft in May of 2004. 

Previous to Microsoft, Rob was CTO for Pervasive Software in Austin, TX a mid-market database vendor.  Pervasive was built upon assets purchased from Novel as Btrieve, taken private as Btrieve Technologies and, after several years of strong revenue growth, taken back public as Pervasive Software. 

Before Pervasive, Rob held a variety of leadership roles within the IBM Corporation.  These roles included Chief Architect for IBM’s PSP division where Rob owned technical and architectural oversight for OS/2 products as well as Senior Architect for the RS/6000 division.

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.

Josh Smith
Josh Smith has been developing desktop applications in C# since the .NET Framework was first released.  He was awarded the Microsoft MVP and CodeProject MVP titles in 2007 for his work in the WPF community.  Josh has been a WPF fanatic since it was in pre-beta, and has helped share his enthusiasm for WPF with others via CodeProject articles and blog posts. 

He worked for a couple of years at Infragistics, as a developer in their Windows Forms Development Lab.  During that time he became deeply interested in user interface technologies and design.  After that he had a brief stint as a software consultant in the financial services industry, but found that it did not tickle his fancy.  He did, however, have the rare opportunity to create a WPF application for the Elite Model Management agency, which was shown in a video at the Microsoft Windows Vista launch events. 
Josh is currently working for the New York Times on their fantastic Times Reader application, which uses WPF for the presentation layer. You can visit his WPF blog here: http://JoshSmithOnWpf.wordpress.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.

Jason Zander. Microsoft

Jason Zander is the General Manager of the .NET Framework (DevFX) team in the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation.  As GM, Jason’s team responsibilities include the .NET Compact Framework for Windows CE/Mobile and the Xbox 360, the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Forms, Silverlight, and finally executive direction of the .NET Framework.

As one of the original developers of the CLR, Jason’s primary technical area of contributions include file formats, metadata, compilers, debugging/profiling, and integration of the system into key Microsoft products such as Windows and SQL Server.  Before becoming GM, Jason held many roles on the CLR team including Product Unit Manager and Development Manager.  Prior to working on the CLR, Jason worked on the Repository and SourceSafe products and before that on the first two versions of ODBC.  Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Jason worked at IBM on Distributed SQL and SQL/400 at the Rochester lab.  Jason holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from MSU.  In his spare time, Jason enjoys playing with his three children and making furniture in his shop.  Jason's blog can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz.