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.

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.

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.

John works on the IronRuby compiler at Microsoft.

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.