Nikolai Tillmann has been with Microsoft Research for 6 years. He is currently leading the Pex project, building an automated test case generation tool for .NET based program analysis. Previously, he worked on Spec Explorer, a model-based testing tool.

Peter Provost is a Sr. Program Manager with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Architect Edition. He is a recognized agile coach, author and presenter and brings more than 10 years of agile development and project management experience. Peter is currently working with VSTS Architect Edition to help create the next wave of architectural and modeling tools.

John has been in the business of debuggers and diagnostic tools for around 15 years. He cut his teeth on debuggers for Windows 16 and 32bit, SunOS and Solaris. After a brief stint doing embedded debuggers at Wind River Systems, John joined Microsoft during the Visual Studio .Net product cycle. He has worked as a developer and lead on native and managed debuggers. John was part of the TeamSystem team from Day -30, working on the VS profiler and code coverage. Since then John has worked on starting the project for the application flight recorder as well as continuing to develop debugging and profiling technologies. John dreams in CodeView records. There is no cure.

Thomas Ball is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he manages the Software Reliability Research group (http://research.microsoft.com/srr/). Tom has been at Microsoft Research since 1999. He is one of the originators of the SLAM project, a software model checking engine for C that forms the basis of the Static Driver Verifier tool, made freely available by Microsoft for finding defects in device drivers. Tom's interests range from program analysis, model checking, testing and automated theorem proving to the problems of defining and measuring software quality.

Madan Musuvathi is a Researcher at Microsoft Research and is interested in building program analysis tools to improve the productivity of developers and testers. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004.

Douglas Crockford discovered the JSON data interchange format. He is leading an effort at ECMA to develop a secure successor to JavaScript. He is the author of JavaScript: The Good Parts.

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. He is currently Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Jeremy Siek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado. Jeremy's areas of research include generic programming, programming language design, and compiler optimization. Jeremy received a Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2005. His thesis laid the foundation for the constrained templates feature in the next C++ Standard. Also while at Indiana, Jeremy developed the Boost Graph Library, a C++ generic library for graph algorithms and data structures. Jeremy did a post-doc at Rice University where he developed gradual typing: a type system that integrates dynamic and static typing. Jeremy is currently developing a gradually-typed version of Python.

Anders Hejlsberg is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division. He is an influential creator of development tools and programming languages. He is the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the Microsoft .NET framework. Since its initial release in 2000, the C# programming language has been widely adopted and is now standardized by ECMA and ISO. Before his work on C# and the .NET framework, Hejlsberg was an architect for Visual J++ development and the Windows Foundation classes. Before joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was one of the first employees of Borland International Inc. As principal engineer, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal, a revolutionary integrated development environment, and chief architect of its successor, Delphi. Hejlsberg co-authored "The C# Programming Language", published by Addison Wesley, and has received numerous software patents. In 2001, he was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.

Wolfram Schulte is a principal researcher and the founding manager of the Research in Software Engineering area, at Microsoft Research Redmond, USA. Wolfram’s research concerns the practical application of formal methods. At Microsoft, Wolfram co-lead research projects on language design and runtimes (the AsmL, Cw, TPL projects), software testing (the Pex, SpecExplorer, and nModel projects), software analysis and verification (the Spec#, Vcc and Hypervisor project), and lately on model-driven engineering of applications for the cloud (formula and bam). Among Schulte’s contributions to Microsoft technologies are his work on model-based and concolic testing, on contract-based static analysis, on data access integration and concurrent runtimes. Wolfram lives with his spouse Rita and 2 kids in Bellevue. In his spare time, he enjoys the beautiful outdoors of the cascades.

Alex Turner is the Program Manager for the C# Compiler at Microsoft, where he makes sure that C#’s new language features and compiler services become a reality. Alex graduated with an MS in Computer Science from Stony Brook University and has been a speaker at TechEd and TechDays.

Nikolai Tillmann has been with Microsoft Research for 6 years. He is currently leading the Pex project, building an automated test case generation tool for .NET based program analysis. Previously, he worked on Spec Explorer, a model-based testing tool.

Mike Barnett has been at Microsoft Research since 1995. He has spent the last several years working on the Spec# project, an advanced verification environment and language for .NET.

Emre Kiciman is a researcher in the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) at Microsoft Research, where his interests are broadly in the area of large-scale Internet services, their operations, and their end-to-end reliability. His work focuses on monitoring and machine learning analysis of system behavior to improve reliability and performance. Most recently, he's been working on Web application performance and debugging.

Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager in the Developer Division, aiming to spread good information about developing software, very often on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years. He was also involved in a few Microsoft Developer things for many years like the MVP and RD programs and will speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen. He's written a few books, most recently with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader on ASP.NET. He blogs at http://www.hanselman.com and podcasts at http://www.hanselminutes.com.

Jeff King is a Program Manager in Microsoft's Developer Division. He is responsible for the Visual Studio ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editors. In previous releases, Jeff has also been responsible for the WYSIWYG design surface, delivering the Visual Web Developer Express Edition product, and authoring the Personal Web Site Starter Kit. On the side, he enjoys developing user experiences with WPF.

Cameron Skinner joined Microsoft in 2005 and is currently a product unit manager on the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) team. He is responsible for overseeing the Team Edition – Architect product line. Prior to Microsoft, Mr. Skinner was the CTO and chief architect of application development tools for Embarcadero Technologies. Earlier in his career, he served as CTO for Advanced Software Technologies. In his limited spare time, Mr. Skinner enjoys spending time with his wife and three children, and playing his acoustic bass.

Gert Drapers is the Group Engineering Manager for the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition product as known as the “Data Dude”. After 3 years of Ashton-Tate where he was first introduced to SQL Server in 1988, Gert joined Microsoft in 1991. Prior to his current position he was a member of the SQL Server development team where he held various positions varying from development to management. He contributed to SQL Server 7.0, 2000 and 2005; some SQL Server artifacts he worked on are: BULK INSERT, SQL-DMO, SQL Query Analyzer, SQL Profiler, DTS, SQL Agent and SMO. After SQL 2000 he joined the Indigo team where he designed the System.Transactions API and worked on MS-DTC and the web services (WS-AT) transaction specification. In September of 2003 he joined the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team where he focused on helping customers design and implement the largest SQL Server implementations in the world. In July 2005 he started the DataDude project, which goal in life is to provide an offline schema development and deployment environment for SQL Server and other data stores. Right now the team is finishing up the 3rd release of the product! When Gert is not working, he is spending time with his wife and three lovely daughters; loves to cook and make music. Besides that he is serving the SQL Server community by writing tools and articles which are published on http://SQLDev.Net and various magazines.

John works on the IronRuby compiler at Microsoft.

Frank Savage is veteran game developer with 17 years of professional experience. Starting at Origin Systems in 1991, Frank worked on Strike Commander and was the lead on Wing Commander 3. After leaving Origin in 1995, he worked on the MechCommander game at the startup FASA Interactive. FASA was acquired by Microsoft in 1999 and after completing MechCommander Gold and MechCommander 2 for Microsoft Game Studios, Frank went to work for the Advanced Technology Group in Xbox just before the launch of the first Xbox console. In 2004, Frank joined the XNA team which has evolved into the XNA Community Game Platform team and now works as an architect on the Framework and Tools team delivering XNA Game Studio.

Koby Avital has over twenty years experience as a senior executive, GM (SVP/VP) of Engineering and CTO in highly competitive software companies in enterprise applications and solutions, networking, communications, Internet applications, Internet security and multi-tiers real-time systems. Koby join Microsoft two years ago from SAP (GM composite applications, and a co-GM of SAP’s Enterprise Service Architecture) and from PeopleSoft (Chief Scientist and HCM head of development). With Microsoft Koby is heading CSD technology and products integration projects with internal Microsoft products to achieve better alignment across divisions. Koby is using his broad experience and market understanding to influence Microsoft products direction aiming on providing short and long term solutions to existing and future markets

I am the Principal Program Manager in the VSTS Test Business which is part of the Developer Division. I enjoy building well integrated set of tools and technologies that enable developers build, test and ship quality software. I started my career at Microsoft 18 years ago in the Windows Division after 3.5 years working as a programmer in India and a M.S.(CS) from Oregon State University. After working as a Developer and Development Lead and shipping several releases of the award winning Routing and Remote Access Services for Windows, I moved to the MS India Development Center (MSIDC) in Hyderabad. I was a founding member of the team of employees who moved from Redmond to create MSIDC. As Development Lead and Manager I shipped the award winning Services For Unix (2.0 and 3.0). I then moved on to build the Windows Sustained Engineering team from ground up culminating in shipping the Windows 2000 URP release. Before joining the Developer Division I was the Product Unit Manager for the Windows Client Servicing group in Redmond.

Dr. Wagner is a former Eclipse board member and lead of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, now working with the Visual Studio platform team to enhance the Visual Studio product line with extensible technologies and to exploit WPF to create new user interaction scenarios. His interests include IDEs, compiler front ends, and the creation of extensible platforms and APIs.

Giovanni has been a developer at Microsoft for 12 years. In that time, he's worked on VB5, VJ6, WinForms, ADO.Net, WCF and WS-Security* specifications. He's currently working on Oslo's "M" language.

Dragos Manolescu is Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Live Labs, a confederation of engineers and scientists working on advancing the state-of-the-art in Internet products and technology. Most recently he's been interested in web programming, social media, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Prior to joining Microsoft Dragos worked in consulting, start-ups, as well as academia. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Daniel Moth has been with Microsoft since April 2006. Before that he worked in industry as a consultant, a developer and he was also an MVP for mobile development (a topic he wrote a book about). Recently he joined the Parallel Computing Platform to work on developer tools for the next versions of Visual Studio. Daniel's interests include anything to do with .NET and he blogs about that at http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog, which is also the best way to reach him.

Steve is the development lead for the Visual Studio Profiler and has been with that team for five years. Before that he was a compiler researcher studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ed Glas is group manager for the Visual Studio Team Test team in Raleigh, NC. Ed led the development of the web and load testing features in Visual Studio Team System from their inception, and is now also leading development of the test case management server. Prior to working at Microsoft, Ed co-founded HAHT Software, where he led the development of the HAHTsite web application IDE and application server. He also worked at startups OneTree Software, creator of SourceSafe, and Q+E software. In his spare time Ed enjoys spending time with his wife and five children and playing soccer.

Douglas Purdy is a product unit manager at Microsoft working on next-generation languages and tools to broaden the franchise of people building applications. His vision is to “make everyone a programmer” (even if they don’t know it). Previously, Douglas was the group program manager for the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF/Indigo) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF/WinOE) teams. Douglas has been with Microsoft, on and off, since 1998 where he has worked in consulting, evangelism and engineering.

Matt is currently the program manger focused on building the WF Designer in Visual Studio.

Dr. Hazim Shafi received a BSEE from Santa Clara, and MS and PhD degrees from Rice University. He joined Microsoft in 2005 from IBM Research. Hazim has over a decade of experience in parallel and distributed processing and has numerous publications and patents in the area. He is currently a Principal Architect on the Parallel Computing Platform team leading its efforts in parallel performance analysis tools. He also teaches classes on multithreaded application development at Microsoft.

Don Box is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft working on declarative languages and tools to simplify developing applications and services. In that role, Don is involved in creating languages, frameworks, and end-to-end experiences to help people translate their intentions and desires for software into a machine readable and executable form. Don joined Microsoft in 2002 as an architect of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), where he worked on software to enable programs to safely and securely interoperate with one another. Don’s responsibilities included both the design and architecture of the runtime stack, as well as interoperability protocols with IBM and other partners. Before joining Microsoft, Don was an independent consultant focused on software integration technologies. Don was the leading external voice for Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and helped shape the way developers across the globe experience those technologies. In 1996, Don worked as a consultant to Software AG and Microsoft on the UNIX-based Distributed COM project; that work gave Don the desire to move away from shared-runtime distributed architectures and embrace data-centric message passing using XML. To that end, Don worked with Microsoft and Dave Winer to create the original SOAP specification in 1998. Don is a respected writer on software development topics, serving as a series editor at Addison Wesley and as a contributing editor to C++ Report, Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ), and MSDN Magazine. Don’s first book, Essential COM, remains a part of the C++ developer’s canon. Don was the first blogger to publish RSS from a Microsoft web property (http://www.gotdotnet.com/) and now (sporadically) maintains a blog at http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/ Don has a Master’s degree in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from C.S.U. Long Beach.

Kenny Wolf is an Architect at Microsoft responsible for WF and WCF. Previously, Kenny was the Technical Lead for WCF Transports and Channels. Kenny has been with Microsoft since 1997. After shipping 3 versions of Office for the Macintosh, Kenny joined a platform incubation called "Indigo" (now WCF). Kenny holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science from Yale University.

Anders Hejlsberg is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division. He is an influential creator of development tools and programming languages. He is the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the Microsoft .NET framework. Since its initial release in 2000, the C# programming language has been widely adopted and is now standardized by ECMA and ISO. Before his work on C# and the .NET framework, Hejlsberg was an architect for Visual J++ development and the Windows Foundation classes. Before joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was one of the first employees of Borland International Inc. As principal engineer, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal, a revolutionary integrated development environment, and chief architect of its successor, Delphi. Hejlsberg co-authored "The C# Programming Language", published by Addison Wesley, and has received numerous software patents. In 2001, he was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.

Peter Provost is a Sr. Program Manager with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Architect Edition. He is a recognized agile coach, author and presenter and brings more than 10 years of agile development and project management experience. Peter is currently working with VSTS Architect Edition to help create the next wave of architectural and modeling tools.

Daniel Roth has been working on the Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation for the past four years. He is excited to bring the benefits XAML to the world of webservices and workflows.

I am a principal architect of Velocity - the distributed caching platform. Before Microsoft I worked in the Oracle database engine building the object-relational support, XMLDB, XQuery and secure enterprise search product.

Paul Vick is the language architect for Visual Basic, where he leads the language design team. Paul originally began his career working at Microsoft in 1992 on the Microsoft Access team, shipping versions 1.0 through 97 of Access. In 1998, he moved to the Visual Basic team, participating in the design and implementation of the Visual Basic compiler and driving the re-design of the language for the .NET Framework. He is the author of the Visual Basic .NET Language Specification and the Addison Wesley book "The Visual Basic .NET Language." His weblog can be found at http://www.panopticoncentral.net.

Lori Lamkin is the Product Unit Manager of the Redmond Team Foundation team. The product is part of a suite of lifecycle tools designed to increase collaboration of software development teams. Team Foundation is a work item tracking, project management and reporting solution for project managers and team members. She joined Microsoft in 1990 supporting customers with the C/C++ language product and in 1993 became the Unit Manager of C/C++ technical customer support, leading over 100 managers, engineers and outsourced partners to high quality, low cost customer service and product improvement. She joined the Microsoft product development team in 1996 as a Lead Program Manager for C/C++ and became the Group Program Manager for C/C++ and C# in 2001. She moved into the lifecycle tools business in early 2003 to work on Visual Studio Team System as the Group Program Manager of Team Foundation. As Group Program Manager, she was responsible for defining product vision, driving deep customer relationships, building a strong design team, and leading the design and delivery of this version 1.0 product across three Microsoft Development Centers. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics with an emphasis in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Lori enjoys reading, golf, and spending time with her husband and twin boys.

Pablo is a Software Architect in the SQL Server group at Microsoft. He has worked in various areas of SQL Server and he's currently focused on making data and the web work well together with technologies such as Data Services (Project Astoria).

Stephanie Saad is a Group Manager at Microsoft and is currently building tools for agile development. She has been working in the Visual Studio design team for the last 6 years, most of them on planning various new cool stuff for VSTS. She thinks Visual Studio is the coolest thing ever, although she still can't explain to her mom what she does.

Habib Heydarian is a Lead Program manager on the VSTS Development group. His main responsibilities include the Visual Studio debugger, profiler, code coverage and pretty much anything related to troubleshooting and diagnosing applications. He joined Microsoft in 2000 and has been in Developer Division ever since. Before joining Microsoft, Habib studied computer science at the Australian National University in Canberra. While not at work, Habib spends his time playing with robots, shooting hoops or chasing that elusive Yellowfin. One of his favorite possessions is a Washington state license plate with the label "RUNTIME".

Justin Marks started at Microsoft in 2002 after receiving his BS in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT. He has worked on MSN.com as a Systems Engineer, Windows as a Software Design Engineer in Test, and now Visual Studio as a Program Manager. As the PM on the Diagnostics team, Justin has been working on the Historical Debugger feature for the next release of Visual Studio 2010.

Andrew has 20+ years experience in the industry as a developer and architect. He is a Program Manager in the Business Apps team, where he is focused on designing strategic features of the Visual Studio toolset for building Office Business Applications.

Misha Shneerson has been working in Visual Studio Tools for Office team for the past 6 years. Being responsible for the development of VSTO runtime Misha has gained invaluable experience about the live between managed and unmanaged worlds. Misha is passionate about bringing these two closer together and has played the key role in the last improvements in this area.

Andrew has 20+ years experience in the industry as a developer and architect. He is a Program Manager in the Business Apps team, where he is focused on designing strategic features of the Visual Studio toolset for building Office Business Applications.

James Reinders is an expert in the area of parallelism, Intel’s leading spokesperson on tools for parallelism, and author of the O’Reilly Nutshell book on the C++ extensions for parallelism provided by the popular Intel Threading Building Blocks. James has decades of experience with high degrees of parallelism having worked on groundbreaking compilers and architectures such as the systolic arrays WARP and iWarp, and the world’s first TeraFLOP supercomputer (ASCI Red). James is a frequent blogger, columnist on go-parallel.com, and the author and co-author of several books in addition to the recent TBB Nutshell book.

Dave got his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon in 1990. He was a researcher at DEC's System Research Center from 1990 to 1996, working on program verification and garbage collection. He moved to Sun Laboratories in Massachusetts in 1996, working there on parallel and concurrent garbage collection, lock-free algorithms, and just-in-time compilation techniques. He moved to Microsoft's CLR in 2005, and has been working on transactional memory and various CLR architectural issues. He holds 32 patents, and has been on a number of program committees for academic conferences.

John Feo is a principal architect leading the applications framework group in PCP. Prior to joining Microsoft, John worked at Cray Inc and Lawrenece Livermore National Laboratory. At Cray, John developed applications and worked with early customers of the Cray MTA systems. At LLNL, John was the group leader of the Computer Research Group and principal investigator of the Sisal Language Project. John's interest are parallel algorithms, parallel programming models, functional languages, and performance.

David Callahan joined Microsoft in 2005. He is a Distinguished Engineer leading the Parallel Computing Platform Team within Visual Studio® focused on incubating technology for the coming manycore processors. This team is producing exciting new technologies as part of Visual Studio and also driving the Parallel Computing Initiative, a company wide effort to deliver customer value from the power of future high-performance processors. David’s background is in programming languages, parallel programming techniques, and compilation techniques focused on expressing and exploiting concurrency.

Kerry is a Product Architect on the Microsoft Commerce Server Product Unit. Before joining the product unit, he worked with MCS to deliver Commerce Server engagements. Before joining MCS, he worked with JCPenney to deliver their award winning E-Commerce site.

Krzysztof Cwalina is a program manager on the .NET Framework team at Microsoft. He started his career at Microsoft designing APIs for the first release of the Framework. Currently, he is leading the effort to develop, promote, and apply the design guidelines to the .NET Framework. He is a coauthor of Framework Design Guidelines (Addison-Wesley, 2005). Reach him at his blog at blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina.

Miguel de Icaza is Novell's Vice President for the Developer Platform where he runs the open source Mono and Moonlight projects (open source implementations of the .NET Framework). Previously he founded the GNOME project, one of the most popular desktop environments for Linux and Unix systems.

Sameer Chabungbam is a Program Manager in the JScript team at Microsoft, where he is focussed at building tools for web developers. Earlier, he had worked on providing Javascript intellisense in Visual Studio. Recently, he worked on the JScript Profiler that shipped in Internet Explorer 8.

Joshua Goodman is currently the Group Program Manager for the Common Language Runtime team -- the team that builds the garbage collector, JIT (just-in-time-compiler), security model, hosting model, and base class libraries for .NET. Prior to that, he was Technical Assistant to Bill Gates, and before that he spent 8 years Microsoft Research, where he ran a small team. Many many years ago he was a developer at a speech recognition company.

Jonathan is a 15 year Microsoft veteran who focuses on studying the intersection of graphics/imaging and networks. He is currently the architect of Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. Jonathan is also an avid amateur astronomer and designed built his own automated domed observatory as well as helped develop the field of DSLR astrophotography. When he is not at work on WorldWide Telescope Jonathan tries keep up with his 5 children and explain to them the majesty of the stars.

Kevin Gjerstad is the Group Program Manager for Windows Presentation Foundation. He has been at Microsoft for fourteen years and has worked on numerous projects including multiple versions of Internet Explorer as well as the presentation bits in Windows. Underpinning all his work is a passion for significantly improving user experience and usability by making it easier for developers to build great applications. Kevin is a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Mark is a Program Manager on the "Cider" team, which builds the WPF and Silverlight Designers in Visual Studio. He is responsible for the layout features of the designer. Prior to joining developer division Mark worked in Microsoft Services as a Development Lead, building large scale web-based UIs for the UK Government, the BBC and others.

Samantha is a Program Manager on the Windows Presentation Foundation team. She is responsible for Tree Services & Controls, including the DataGrid and Ribbon controls, and the Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit. Prior to joining Microsoft, Samantha was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology.

Moe is the Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Sync Framework and has been with the project since its incubation - currently driving the group's incubations and device to cloud strategies related to content flow...

Jason is the Program Manager responsible for syncronization of Personal Information Manager (PIM) data between new windows certified portable devices and PC applications. Jason has come to Windows after working with PIM data on Exchange Server.

Raymond Chen has been involved in the evolution of Windows for over a decade. He currently works in the Windows User Experience group. He also writes The Old New Thing Web site and TechNet Magazine's Windows Confidential column. He has been called insane by Zack Simpson.

Stefan works as a program manager on the ASP.NET team. He covers a number of areas in the ASP.NET core runtime, as well as having worked recently on the Html bridge feature in Silverlight 2.

Steve is Program Manager at Microsoft on the SQL Server Copmact team, working to empower developers to enable their occasionally connected users. For Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008, Steve focused on the design for Sync Services 1.0. For VS 2005, Steve worked on many of the data design time features including the Typed DataSet designer, TableAdapters, Object Binding and the Data Sources Window. Prior to joining Microsoft, Steve was a technical architect with an early internet eCommerce company moving to a consulting firm building web, client and device applications for corporate customers. With an engineering background in the remote broadcasting industry Steve lived the life of the mobile workforce where he gained his passion for the occasionally connected user.

Shawn Burke has at Microsoft since 1997, spending all of that time in Developer Division developing UI framworks such as Windows Forms, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight Controls. Shawn is currently the Product Unit Manager of the WPF/Silverlight Controls Team. Shawn holds a Bachelors of Business Administration a Bachelors of Science from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Vishal works as a Sr. Program Manager with Visual Studio Web Developer Team and helps in building Technologies and Tools the ASP.NET and IIS space. He has been with Microsoft since last 3 years. Before joining Microsoft he was a Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET working as a Systems Architect for Compuware Corporation. Few of the projects that Vishal has worked on in the recent past are ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint, ASP.NET Web Site, ASP.NET Web Applications, Visual Studio Web Developer (VWD) Express and ASP.NET Web Deployment.

Stephen Walther is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET MVC content and community. He is the author of the best-selling book on ASP.NET, ASP.NET Unleashed. He is writing ASP.NET MVC Unleashed.

Started out writing bulletin board software with Turbo Pascal which became a startup software development business. Graduated from California State Bakersfield with a degree in Computer Science and Economics. Scott has spent the past 8 years developing software in the .NET space mainly in the ASP.NET area. For the past year Scott has worked at Microsoft on the ASP.NET as a Program Manager currently working on Dynamic Data and all things around data.

Karen Corby is a Program Manager on the Silverlight team who focuses on control customization and HTTP networking. She holds a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. In her spare time, Karen enjoys hiking, reading, travel, and photography. Her blog is http://scorbs.com/work.

Ian Ellison-Taylor is the General Manager for Microsoft’s Presentation Platforms and Tools Team (PP&T) which creates technologies that enables developers and designers to build revolutionary next-generation user experiences for the desktop, the web and devices. Currently the group produces the UI framework (known as “WPF”), controls and developer tools for .Net and Silverlight. Ian has been working on various user-experience related platforms at Microsoft for more than 15 years across a variety of products including Windows, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio. He joined Microsoft in 1990 as developer on the Windows 3.1 team having graduated from the University of Durham, England.

Dan Polivy is a lead program manager in the PC|3 Division at Microsoft, where he is responsible for the Windows SideShow platform and other new features for Windows 7. Previously, he was a developer working on the design and implementation of Windows SideShow. He has been at Microsoft for over six years, and started as a member of the Tablet PC team. Dan graduated from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science, and currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife.

Rob Jarrett is a Sr. Software Design Engineer on the Core User Experience team, and is a key contributor to the architecture, interaction, visuals, and animation of the Windows 7 taskbar. Rob joined Microsoft in 2000, spending nearly 6 years on the Tablet PC team. During that time, he worked on digital inking and pen/touch interaction in many forms, and co-authored the book "Building Tablet PC Applications". In 2006, he joined the Windows Shell team to explore and enhance window management, primarily focusing on the taskbar. Prior to Microsoft, Rob was a software developer in Toronto, Canada for 8 years.

As a code junkie, Phil Haack loves to craft software. Not only does he enjoy writing software, he enjoys writing about software and software management on his blog, http://haacked.com/. Phil is a Program Manager with the ASP.NET team working on the ASP.NET MVC project. Prior to joining Microsoft, Phil worked as a product manager for a code search engine, a dev manager for an online gaming company, and as a senior architect for a popular Spanish language television network, among other things. In his spare time, Phil contributes to various open source projects and is the founder of the Subtext blog engine project, which he recently learned powers the blogs on MySpace China.

Started out writing bulletin board software with Turbo Pascal which became a startup software development business. Graduated from California State Bakersfield with a degree in Computer Science and Economics. Scott has spent the past 8 years developing software in the .NET space mainly in the ASP.NET area. For the past year Scott has worked at Microsoft on the ASP.NET as a Program Manager currently working on Dynamic Data and all things around data.

Leonardo Blanco has been at Microsoft since 1996. He is a Principal Development Lead in the Windows Desktop and Graphics Technologies team, where he focuses on development and maintenance of existing and new mainstream graphics APIs for Windows. During the Window Vista timeframe, Leonardo worked on the graphics stack that forms the basis of the Windows Presentation Foundation, most notably the composition and animation engines. He also helped build the Windows Vista Desktop Window Manager, which is responsible for Aero Glass and the Flip3D effect. Prior to Windows Vista, Leonardo worked on Windows CE, delivering multimedia technologies to both mobile and embedded devices. Leonardo holds a degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hi, I'm Kam VedBrat, and I'm the Lead Program Manager for Mainstream Graphics API's on the Windows 7 team. I work on technologies including GDI, GDI+, the Windows Imaging Component, the Windows Color System, and (new for Windows 7) Direct2D and Direct Write. Over the last 10 years at Microsoft I've worked on Windows Vista, MSN Explorer, and Internet Explorer. Before Microsoft, I studied Computer Science at Purdue University (Go Boilers!), and graduated in 1998. My favorite color is orange, and if you want to learn more about me, read my blog! Thanks, -Kam

Robert Levy has led the design development of the APIs and controls in the Microsoft Surface SDK. He has been on the Surface team for over two years. His previous projects at Microsoft include the SDKs for Windows Mobile 2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5.0.

Brad leads SW Platform Development efforts for Microsoft Surface, including the development of the sub-system, Shell, and SDK. Previously Brad was General Manager in the Unlimited Potential group, developing Windows solutions & business opportunities to provide computing & information access for people in emerging economies. Previous to that, Brad was Director of HW & Driver Quality for Windows, responsible for device & driver coverage; development of driver development tools; overseeing WHQL & WinHEC; and partnering with the industry to fix blue screens. Brad started on LAN Manager in 1991, moved to work on Windows 95 and subsequent versions of Windows.

David Washington is a Program Manager on the Find and Organize team and is responsible for the Windows Explorer platform. David first arrived at Microsoft in 2002 as an intern on the Microsoft CRM team, and eventually ended up on the Windows Shell team where he worked on the Windows Vista Common File Dialog.

Larry started working at Microsoft back in the dark ages back when computers shipped with kilobytes of memory and a 10 megabytes of disk space. Over his 24 year career he has worked on networking, email servers, embedded controllers for home automation and most recently he works as a developer on the Windows Sound team.

Giorgio Sardo is a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation. Moving from Italy to the United Kingdom, Giorgio studied at Polytechnic of Turin and successfully obtained a Master of Computer Engineering with distinction. For four years he has been a Microsoft Student Partner Lead, leading a national university community forum. In 2007 he started working in Microsoft UK as User Experience Consultant, delivering stunning solutions based on Silverlight, WPF and Silverlight for Mobile. Later 2008 Giorgio will move to Redmond, to work as Technical Evangelist for Web Technologies (ASP.NET, IE8, ...).

Allison Klein is the senior lead program manager for Direct3D technologies. She received her Ph.D. in computer graphics from Princeton University and before (re)joining Microsoft in 2006 she was briefly a university professor of Computer Science.

Anantha is a Graphics nut and joined Microsoft to work on 3D Graphics after dabbling in Virtual Reality in Grad School. In Microsoft, Anantha has worked on a number of aspects of Graphics in a variety of roles. He was a developer on the D3D team for multiple versions. He lead the development team for D3D 9 and since then has been Program Managing various aspects of low level Graphics in Windows such as DX, GDI, Display Drivers, Window Manager. His proudest moment was accepting a Technical Emmy for DirectX technologies on the behalf of his team.

Nikola Dudar is a program manager on Windows Networking team. He is working on a new Windows API for connecting web services and native code. In his previous position, he was a Program Manager on Visual C++ team. He worked on building new features in VC++ libraries. Prior joining Microsoft, Nikola has been involved in a research of architectures for data warehouses used in scientific data analysis and machine learning. He has MS in Computer Science degree from the University of New Mexico and MS degree in Control Systems and Automation from Vinnytsya National Technical University.

Ben Ravani is a General Manager in the Global Foundation Services at Microsoft. Ben brings 21 years of experience in the high tech industry from business planning and product development to services design and operations support. Ben currently leads an organization that manages over 100 of Microsoft’s online properties with 10,000’s of servers deployed in data centers globally providing services to Hundreds of Millions of users worldwide. The scope of his responsibilities includes managing services with over a Billion transactions per day and 10’s of millions of concurrent sessions. He is responsible for operating a number of platform services including Windows Live ID, Messenger and Anti Phishing. Ben has provided design consulting to services such as WLID, Microsoft’s online Billing platform, Microsoft’s Rights Management Platform, and Microsoft’s award winning Internet Safety platform. Ben joined Microsoft over 14 years. Since then, he has held various leadership roles at Microsoft involved in developing and building a number of products and services. Ben started his career in developing technologies in the automotive and aerospace industries. He led an engineering team in the Boeing 777 development program responsible for the Electrical and Avionics Engineering Computing. He holds a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Danny Kim is a Microsoft MVP and recognized industry expert on Windows Group Policy, Active Directory, and PowerShell. Kim has helped more than 30 Fortune 100 companies, including Bank of America, Boeing, and Wal-Mart, design and deploy their Group Policy and DataCenter infrastructure. He has also architected and developed several leading Windows policy management products which have been licensed by Microsoft, NetIQ, Citrix, HP, Sony, Toshiba and others. Kim holds a BS in Computer Science from Cornell University.

John Shriver-Blake is in his fourth year at Microsoft and with the Live Meeting service engineering team. In his role as a Senior Lead Program Manager, he has been responsible for aspects of the service ranging from architecture to user experience. John was a key contributor to a significant overhaul of the Live Meeting service’s infrastructure and architecture. His work helped improve the services reliability and flexibility, and prepared the platform for the release of LiveMeeting 2007. John is also responsible for the LiveMeeting developer platform, maintaining and promoting the Live Meeting XML-API’s, and working with partners and customers who integrate with Live Meeting. John leads the PM team responsible for driving the user experience and feature set for these areas. John has a passion for software as a service and is excited by the challenges and opportunities available in the Unified Communications space.

Jeffrey Snover is the Partner architect for Windows Manageability and the inventor of Windows PowerShell, our next generation Automation/Scripting technologies. Jeffrey has spent the majority of his 28 years in the industry focused on the problems of network and systems management. Prior to coming to Microsoft in 2000, Jeffrey was an architect in the CTO office at Tivoli and was the development manager for NetView. Jeffrey was also a Consulting Engineer and development manager at Digital where he led various network and systems management projects.

Mathew George is a senior developer with the file access and distribution team. He is a co-designer of the SMB2 protocol stack and currently involved in the development of the SMB2 client filesystem stack for the Windows platform.

Chuck is an architect in the Cloud Infrastructure Services team, focusing on virtualization. Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows from NT 3.1 to Vista.

Stefan works as a program manager on the ASP.NET team. He covers a number of areas in the ASP.NET core runtime, as well as having worked recently on the Html bridge feature in Silverlight 2.

Manuvir Das is a Director in the Cloud Infrastructure Services division at Microsoft Corporation, where he has been working, with many others, on delivering a world class services platform to developers. In his other life, Manuvir is a reasearcher and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington. His research interests have been in inventing and applying techniques from Programming Languages, Compilers, and Systems to the software engineering process. He previously led the Program Analysis research group in the Center for Software Excellence at Microsoft. Manuvir has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sean Mortazavi is an architect at Microsoft in the HPC group focusing on Developer Tools. Prior to WHPC he was in the Visual Studio and MSR divisions where he worked on Microsoft's next generation of compilers, JITs and Static Analysis tools. Before Microsoft he was at Sun Microsystems where he led the compiler code generation & optimization groups.

CJ is a North Carolina native from the small town of New Bern. For those who've never heard of New Bern (the vast majority I'm sure), it was the colonial capiatol of NC as well as the birth place of Pepsi Cola. CJ attended NC State University where he recieved his BS and MS in Computer Science before transplanting himself to western Washington to work for Microsoft just over 7 years ago. CJ has worked on a number of projects at Microsoft including threedegrees, Windows Live (then MSN) Messenger, and (most recently) Windows Home Server.

CJ is a North Carolina native from the small town of New Bern. For those who've never heard of New Bern (the vast majority I'm sure), it was the colonial capiatol of NC as well as the birth place of Pepsi Cola. CJ attended NC State University where he recieved his BS and MS in Computer Science before transplanting himself to western Washington to work for Microsoft just over 7 years ago. CJ has worked on a number of projects at Microsoft including threedegrees, Windows Live (then MSN) Messenger, and (most recently) Windows Home Server.

Fabian hails from Germany. He lives and studies in the town of Cottbus located near Berlin. Fabian attended the Brandenburg University of Technology where he received his BS degree in Information and Media Technology. He is currently a graduate student in his last year before writing his master thesis. He has worked for Microsoft Germany for about 2 years as a Senior Student Partner. In short, he leads regional group of “student evangelists” that advocate the use of Microsoft development tools in academia. Fabian most recently began an internship as a program manager on the Windows Home Server team in Redmond, Washington.

My name is Nihar Shah, and I work on the Hyper-V team at Microsoft. I have been working in the virtualization space for 8 years, dating back to my pre-Microsoft days at Connectix. Among other things, I am the lead in charge of defining and implementing the Hyper-V WMI object model.

Taylor Brown is a Test Lead in the Windows Core Operating System (COSD) division focused on ensuring customers and partners are enabled to fully utilize Windows virtualization technology. He has been focused on Virtualization since 2004 working on Virtual PC, Virtual Server, Virtual Server R2 and Hyper-V. Prior to joining the Core OS division Taylor worked on the Microsoft Smart Watch Project also known as MSN Direct as well as Windows power management and Windows 1394/fire wire teams.

Pablo is a Software Architect in the SQL Server group at Microsoft. He has worked in various areas of SQL Server and he's currently focused on making data and the web work well together with technologies such as Data Services (Project Astoria).

Brad Calder is Director/Architect of Cloud Storage, which is the essential scalable, available and durable storage for Microsoft’s Cloud Platform. Before Microsoft he was a Professor at University of California, San Diego in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and a co-founder of three startup companies: Entropia Inc., TracePoint Inc., and Bit-Raker Inc. He received his undergraduate degrees from University of Washington and his graduate degree from University of Boulder, Colorado.

Sriram is a mild-mannered Program Manager on the Cloud Infrastructure Services team at Microsoft. Before this, he worked on Popfly and Visual Studio for Devices. He loves to game on his XBox 360 and tries to hide his love for all things Star Trek

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Clouds Infrastructure Services group where he is leading a team responsible for several components of a cloud computing platform. Yousef is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources. Previously, he led an advanced development team in Windows that tackled a number of related operating system areas, including application management and isolation. Before joining Microsoft, Yousef was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. At Sun, he held positions including CTO and Chief Architect of Solaris, Chief Architect of the Sun Cluster product line, and Chief Architect of Sun's N1 product line. He has a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Jitendra is a part of Microsoft Technology center at Infosys and an Architect on Catalytic IT, a joint IT Transformation Program with Microsoft. Currently he leads the Cloud Computing group and defines how various solutions and service offerings in Infosys should leverage this disruptive technology to provide a better value to our customers.

Erik Johnson is Sr. Director of Product Research for Epicor Software, the 6th-largest global ERP software supplier and responsible for managing software architecture strategy and relationships with technology partners. Erik represented Epicor at the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), where he contributed to the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 and chaired the XML Schema working group. As an enterprise solutions architect, Erik was named to the Microsoft Architecture Advisory Board and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Prior to joining Epicor, Erik worked as a senior software architect and development manager at DataWorks Corporation.

Max Feingold is a development manager at Microsoft, building frameworks for scalability and loosely-coupled messaging. His team’s vision is to make it incredibly easy for developers to build highly scalable web services. Max has been with Microsoft since 1999, working as a developer on COM, COM+ and Transactions. He shipped COM and COM+ in Windows 2000, XP and 2003, and led the development of the transactional stack underneath the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF/Indigo). He also worked towards standardizing the WS-Transactions family of interoperability protocols. Max is a native of Cortegana, Spain and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cornell University.

David Robinson is a Senior Program Manager on the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) team. David is responsible for a multitude of things including driving product features, code samples, and most importantly demonstrating to customers the value that SSDS and cloud computing provides. David enjoys getting out in the community, presenting on SSDS, gathering feedback, and helping to ensure SSDS meets whatever demands you throw at it. David has also written for MSDN magazine on developing solutions against SSDS. Before joining the SSDS team, David was a Solutions Architect on Microsoft's Health and Life Sciences team. Before joining Microsoft, David held various senior positions with a variety of software and consulting companies. David got his start as a developer at Computer Associates in the early 90's. When not working, David enjoys spending time with his wife and helping her corral their 4 young daughters.

Robert works in adCenter managing a couple billion dollars in billing one click and impression at a time. He has worked in the software-as-a-service space for the better part of a decade, joining most recently from the Live Meeting team.

Jason is the Senior Lead Program Manager for the Exchange Web Services team. Jason has been a member of the Microsoft Exchange team for the last seven years working on mobile, web, and developer experiences. Jason earned a Master of Science degree in Computing and Software Systems from the University of Washginton and his BS from the University of Puget Sound.

Jan is a technical program manager in Federated Identity team inside Identity and Security Division. He is designing products that help developers and IT professionals make the Internet and enterprise applications secure. Before joining Federated Identity team, Jan was a program manager responsible for the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) security feature.

Arie has been at Microsoft for 10 years working on technologies including ACPI, Windows Embedded, PCI Express, Plug and Play, WOW64, Server Power Management, Windows Hardware Error Architecture, and Scale Up. Prior to working at Microsfot he was an IT administrator, educator and US Army officer.

Clemens Vasters works as a Program Manager in the .NET Online Services team and is responsible for the 'Service Bus' feature area of Microsoft's upcoming Cloud Platform. Before joining Microsoft some 2 1/2 years ago, Clemens spoke at many conferences, taught technology, and helped companies with software architecture in over 35 countries. Since joining Microsoft, Clemens has mostly been in 'stealth mode' and worked on the WCF, Oslo, and the Cloud Services Platform teams.

Il-Sung Lee is a Program Manager for the Engine team in the SQL Server product group and is the PM owner for SQL Server Engine Security. Il-Sung has over ten years of experience in the database industry as a developer and a program manager focusing on database security and database communications. His current focus is to advance the capabilities of SQL Server in areas such as authentication, authorization, encryption, audit, and intrusion detection. He has presented at numerous SQL Server and DB2 conferences over the past several years. Il-Sung graduated with an M.Eng degree from McGill University and subsequently worked seven and a half years for IBM in their Information Management group before joining Microsoft in 2005.

John is a Group Program Manager with the Live Mesh team. He has been with Microsoft since 2000. Prior to the Live Mesh team he worked in the Windows Core Operating System Division.

Andrew is currently a Principal Program Manager responsible for developer and partner investments in Dynamics CRM. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1997, Andrew worked for an IBM business partner in Southern California and has 15 years experience in product development and project management.

Moustafa Khalil Ahmed is a Program Manager with the .Net Online Services team at Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA. Since joining Microsoft in 2000, he helped develop and ship multiple server products and development frameworks and tools including BizTalk Server 2004, Windows Workflow Foundation in .Net Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008. Moustafa is currently focused on Cloud-Based Services and particularly Workflow Service.

I am lead program manager in the SQL Server Reporting Services team. Prior to becoming a program manager, I graduated from Harvard in 1997 with a Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics and joined Microsoft shortly afterwards. My past projects include mainly development of business intelligence applications and data mining algorithms.

My name is Michael Wang, and I’m currently a senior program manager lead in the SQL Server engine application platform product team of Microsoft. My team is primarily responsible for driving & delivering product features and improvements for sever side programmability that covers SQL data types, libraries/functions, SQL relational accessibility, T-SQL procedure programming & logic, SQLCLR, T-SQL supportability,globalization and etc.

Isaac Kunen is a senior program manager on the SQL Server engine programmability team. Isaac has recently been concentrating on spatial database support, in addition to working on the SQL Server type system, SQL CLR integration, and database extensibility. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2005, Isaac was a developer at BEA Systems.

Jorgen Thelin is a Senior Program Manager for Identity Services in the Windows Live Division at Microsoft in Redmond. He deals with the creation of new product features for Microsoft’s federated identity provider infrastructure known as Windows Live ID, with particular focus on the developer-facing integration APIs.

David Campbell is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working on Cloud Data Platform technologies. Campbell has been with Microsoft for 14 years working on SQL Server and a number of other database and storage related technologies.

Zach Owens is a Technical Evangelist focused on SQL Server and Business Intelligence. He has a background in competitor technologies developing web-based solutions spanning Oracle data warehouses to LAMP e-government applications, and is a recent Seattle transplant from Maui where he was developing medical logistics and intelligence applications.

Chris is a Program Manager on the Windows SharePoint Services team. He focusses on the developer platform aspects of WSS. Previously Chris spent 5 years in MCS working on deploying SharePoint to some of Microsofts largest customers. Chris is from New Zealand & enjoys throwing himself out of perfectly good airplanes.

Clemens Vasters works as a Program Manager in the .NET Online Services team and is responsible for the 'Service Bus' feature area of Microsoft's upcoming Cloud Platform. Before joining Microsoft some 2 1/2 years ago, Clemens spoke at many conferences, taught technology, and helped companies with software architecture in over 35 countries. Since joining Microsoft, Clemens has mostly been in 'stealth mode' and worked on the WCF, Oslo, and the Cloud Services Platform teams.

Mark is an 8+ year veteran at Microsoft and has held numerous technical and business roles. Currently, Mark is a Senior Product Manager for Virtual Earth and owns the developer and partner ecosystem.

Humberto is a Program Manager at the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team; he is a member of the "platform" group and focuses on providing the framework, tools and extension points that developers, architects and partners can take advantage of when building applications on top of CRM. He is passionate about software development and user experience and looks at Dynamics CRM outside its traditional meaning (Customer Relationships Management) and more as the engine that drives business applications… an engine that is easy to use and can save a lot of development time. Previous experiences include project management and software development positions in several companies back in his home county, Mexico, where he dealt with problems in very different domains, from multimedia to distributed systems and security. Humberto holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems and Management from ITESM, CCM.

José Blakeley is Partner Architect in the SQL Server Engine at Microsoft where he works on server programmability, database engine extensibility, query processing, object-relational functionality, large scale query processing, and scientific database applications. He joined Microsoft in 1994. Some of his contributions include the development of the OLE DB data access interfaces, the integration of the .NET runtime inside the SQL Server 2005, the extensibility features in SQL Server, and the creation of the ADO.NET Entity Framework in Visual Studio 2008. José has authored many conference papers, book chapters and journal articles on design aspects of relational and object database management systems, and data access. Before joining Microsoft, José was a member of the technical staff with Texas Instruments where he was co-principal investigator of the DARPA Open-OODB system. He received a B. Eng from ITESM, Monterrey, Mexico, and a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Waterloo, Canada.

Abolade Gbadegesin has constructed numerous castles across the Live Mesh cloud. Before that, he worked as a plumber replacing the Windows networking stack. Now he's a mechanic on the Windows Live storage platform, assembling interesting machines from sundry spare parts.

Gopal Kakivaya is an architect working on the SQL data services team and is responsible for the distributed algorithms employed by SQL data services to achieve scale, availability, consistency, and self-management. He is passionate about distributed systems and has been a significant contributor to many Microsoft technologies, including COM/DCOM, COM+, CLR, SOAP, Web services, and SQL.