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.