Ade Miller is currently a Software Development Lead with Microsoft's patterns & practices group. He is currently leading development of the Web Services Software Factory. Before joining p&p he was a development lead on Visual Studio Tools for Office. Prior to joining Microsoft Ade worked in a variety of development environments including start-ups, consultancy and web publishing. His primary interest is in improving software development practices and spends much of his time trying to figure out what being more ?agile? really means. Ade received his BS and PhD in Physics from the University of Southampton, UK.

With nearly 20 years experience in the software industry as a developer, solution architect, and Agile coach, Alan Ridlehoover is the resident Test Architect in Microsoft's patterns & practices group. In that role, Alan is responsible for producing guidance around Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, fostering a community for testers and test managers to help Microsoft better understand their unique needs, and mentoring Agile practices and approaches within the p&p Test community and throughout Microsoft. Outside of Microsoft, Alan is an active participant in the broader Agile community, a board member and frequent speaker at the Seattle XP Users' Group, and a session reviewer for Agile 2006.

Anders Hejlsberg is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division. Hejlsberg is recognized as 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 gained widespread adoption and is now standardized by ECMA and ISO. Before his work on C# and the .NET Framework, Hejlsberg was an architect for the Visual J++ development system 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, Hejlsberg was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award. Hejlsberg studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark.

Billy Hollis is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic. NET, VB.NET Programming on the Public Beta, from Wrox Press, as well as numerous other books and articles on .NET. At Microsoft's request, Billy served as the co-instructor for all preparation sessions for Microsoft's first .NET Developer Training Tour, thereby training over two hundred instructors who delivered this material world-wide. Billy writes a monthly column for MSDN Online, and is heavily involved in training, consultation, and software development on the Microsoft .NET platform. He frequently speaks at industry conferences and is a MSDN Regional Director.

Bob Brumfield is a software developer at Microsoft with the patterns & practices team, primarily working on the Web Service Software Factory. Prior to joining Microsoft, he focused on helping teams deliver Microsoft-based solutions as a consultant in the Colorado Rocky Mountain region. Bob has more than 15 years experience with professional software development and architecture.

Brad Wilson is a software developer at Microsoft on the Code Gallery team. Prior to that he has was with the patterns & practices team where he contributed to the Composite UI Application Block and Enterprise Library projects. Prior to Microsoft, Brad has worked primarily at small ISVs focusing on Microsoft technologies. Brad has more than 10 years of experience in professional software development, design and architecture. Brad is an outspoken advocate for agile development technologies, especially test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration.

Christopher Brown is Senior Development Lead for Microsoft's Edge Computing Network. He has engineered distributed scalable computing services for both Microsoft and Amazon.com, managed the integration of the Common Language Runtime in Microsoft's SQL Server and spoken at conferences around the world. Working for companies including Internap LLC, Amazon.com and Microsoft, Christopher has patented work in network routing optimization, runtime hosting, and distributed capacity management.

David LeBlanc is a senior security technologist in Microsoft?s Information Technology Group. His primary role is defending the Microsoft network from attack, and he is the co-author of the book 'Writing Secure Code'. He has worked in the security field throughout his professional life, including working at Internet Security Systems where he was the primary engineer on ISS?s award-winning security products. David serves on a number of external security-related advisory boards.

Dragos Manolescu is an architect in the patterns and practices group at Microsoft. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He co-authored Integration Patterns (Microsoft Press, 2004) and was the lead editor of Pattern Languages of Program Design 5 (Addison-Wesley, 2007). Prior to joining Microsoft Dr. Manolescu developed and led ThoughtWorks' Architecture Evaluation practice, assisting Global 1000 companies with the evaluation and design of software architectures.

Gareth Jones is a Senior Developer with Microsoft in the UK. He is one of the creators of the Visual Studio DSL Tools, and a co-author of the book "Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools". Gareth also writes an MSDN blog on Visual Studio Extensibility.

Grigori Melnik is a Senior Product Planner in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, coach and educator with 15+ years of meaningful industrial and research experience. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, software testing and test automation, e-business software engineering, and software economics. Prior industrial engagements include Microsoft Canada Money and SmallBiz portals, Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal, and The Canadian Agile Network - Le Réseau Agile Canadien. Grigori is an agile enthusiast who has been involved with the agile community since 2000. He is a Certified Scrum Master, a member of the Agile Alliance, and a regular contributor and speaker to agile conferences and workshops around the world. Grigori is the Research Chair of the Agile 2007 conference. He is also a co-editor of the IEEE Software Magazine special issue devoted to Test-Driven Development.

Harry Pierson is an architect for the platform used by the next generation of Microsoft's internal IT Systems. Harry is also well known as the DevHawk.

James Newkirk is the development lead for Code Gallery. Previous to that, he was the development lead for the Microsoft Platform Architecture Guidance team, building guidance and reusable assets for enterprise customers through the patterns & practices series. He is the co-author of "Test Driven Development in Microsoft .NET" (Microsoft Press, March 2004).

Prior to joining Microsoft he co-authored "Enterprise Solution Patterns in .NET" (Microsoft patterns & practices) and "Extreme Programming in Practice" (Addison-Wesley). In between writing books and consulting on software projects, James led the development of NUnit V2.

John Lam is a Program Manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft. John created RubyCLR, and is now working on the team that is creating IronRuby, Microsoft's implementation of Ruby. We're building IronRuby on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime, and his team has Ruby running today in their labs inside of the Silverlight runtime.

John lives in beautiful Redmond, WA with his wife, two boys, and Black Lab. He recently relocated to Redmond from Toronto, Canada and is really enjoying life in the Pacific Northwest.

Peter Provost manages the patterns & practices development team at Microsoft. His team works on Guides, Software Factories and Application Blocks like Enterprise Library and the Composite User Interface Application Block. Before joining Microsoft, he was a consultant in the Rocky Mountain region focusing on Microsoft technologies and agile software development techniques. He has spoken at a number of conferences and user groups and has written articles on test-driven development, ASP.NET, Web services and other topics.

Rick Maguire is Senior Director of Development for Microsoft's patterns & practices Group. He is responsible for the development of architecture guidance and software that helps enterprise customers and partners agilely and effectively build trustworthy enterprise applications using the Microsoft .Net platform. Rick was on the "start-up" team that created patterns & practices to deliver cross product architecture guidance and code aligned with future product strategy outside of major product releases. During the five year-history of this group, Rick has held roles in Strategy, Product Planning, and Marketing.

Rockford Lhotka is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies, a company focused on delivering business value through applied technology and one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. Rockford is an author for several Wrox Press titles, including 'Fast Track Visual Basic .NET', 'Professional Visual Basic Interoperability - COM and VB6 to .NET' and 'Visual Basic 6 Distributed Objects' and is a columnist for MSDN Online and contributing author for Visual Studio Magazine. He regularly presents at major conferences around the world - including Microsoft PDC, Tech Ed, VS Live! and VS Connections. He has over 15 years experience in software development and has worked on many projects in various roles, including software architecture, design and development, network administration and project management.

Scott Densmore is a software developer at Microsoft on the CodePlex team. Prior to that he has was with the patterns & practices team where he was dev lead for Enterprise Library. Prior to Microsoft, Scott worked building retail pricing software and integration for large retailers. Scott has more than 10 years of experience in professional software development, design and architecture. Scott is still thinking about configuration and rewriting it one more time.

Scott Guthrie is General Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division. Scott runs the development teams that build the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS 7.0, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, Visual Web Developer, and Visual Studio Tools for WPF.

Scott Hanselman has been Chief Architect at the Corillian Corporation - he will joing Microsoft in September. Scott has thirteen years of experience developing software, in last 6 years with VB.NET and C#. Scott is proud to have been appointed the Microsoft Regional Director for Portland, OR for the last six, years, developing content for, and speaking at Developer Days and the Visual Studio.NET Launches in both Portland and Seattle. Scott was in the top 5% of audience-rated speakers at TechEd 2003 and 2005. Scott co-presented two top-rated architecture sessions at TechEd 2007. He's spoken in Africa, Europe and Asia on Microsoft technologies, and co-authored Professional ASP.NET 2.0 with Bill Evjen and Devin Rader. Scott has also spoken at VSLive, and was made a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET in 2004 and a Solutions Architecture MVP in 2005. His thoughts on the Zen of .NET, Programming and Web Services is at http://www.computerzen.com

Steve McConnell is CEO and Chief Software Engineer at Construx Software where he writes books and articles, teaches classes, and oversees Construx?s software development practices. Steve is the author of: Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (2006), Code Complete (1993, 2004), Rapid Development (1996), Software Project Survival Guide (1998), and Professional Software Development (2004). His first two books won Software Development magazine's Jolt Excellence award for best programming books of their years.

Steve has worked in the desktop software industry since 1984 and has expertise in rapid development methodologies, project estimation, software construction practices, and third-party contract management. In 1998, readers of Software Development magazine named Steve one of the three most influential people in the software industry along with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. Steve was Editor in Chief of IEEE Software magazine from 1998-2002.

Steve is on the Panel of Experts that advises the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project and was Chair of the IEEE Computer Society?s Professional Practices Committee. Steve earned a Bachelor?s degree from Whitman College and a Master?s degree in software engineering from Seattle University. Read more about Steve at www.stevemcconnell.com or see his current thoughts on his blog at http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/default.aspx.

Ted Neward is an independent software development architect and mentor. He is the author of a number of books, including "Effective Enterprise Java" (Addison-Wesley) and "SSCLI Essentials" (OReilly) and co-author of C# In a Nutshell (OReilly) with Peter Drayton and Ben Albahari. He has also been an instructor with DevelopMentor, where he authored and taught both the Java and .NET curriculum. He speaks frequently for technology user groups and writes technical papers for www.javageeks.com and www.clrgeeks.com.

Wojtek is a Software Architect in the Microsoft's pattern & practices team. He is currently focusing on the development of the Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit and is working with the Microsoft tools groups on defining and development of guidance automation tools. Wojtek has over 20 years of industrial and academic experience. He has held a number of positions in the areas of development of enterprise software, software tools and software-related research at Rational Software, System Software Associates, Andersen Consulting and University of Illinois in Chicago. Wojtek's areas of interests include software architectures, software reuse, software process, and software development automation.