Adam Meltzer has worked at Microsoft for the past 10 years covering many different disciplines from support to development to test. He is passionate about quality and never satisfied with, "good enough."

Ade Miller is the Software Development Manager for Microsoft's patterns & practices group. 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.

Alex spent most of his earlier working life as a technical salesman, and has a love-hate relationship with computers that goes way back to the Sinclair Z80 and the Oric Atmos. He retired from full time work in 1996 to concentrate on writing and developing in the fast-growing arena of the Web. This coincided with the release of Microsoft ASP 1.0, and since then he has been involved in a range of Web development areas; plus data access, XML and other related .NET topics. Alex has written or contributed to over 40 books on Web technologies and contributed over 50 articles to ASP-related Web resources sites. He regularly presents sessions on a range of Web and .NET technologies at conference in the US and in Europe; and is a regular speaker at local .Net user groups and Microsoft local events and road shows. After several years as a consultant working with Microsoft, he is now back working full time again producing documentation and technical guidance for the patterns & practices group on a range of technologies.

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy is a Lead Product Planner for Microsoft patterns and practices group. Prior to taking this role, Ajoy worked as a senior product manager for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. In this role, Ajoy was responsible for product management, strategy and marketing for Microsoft?s enterprise development platform with specific focus on VSTS process offering and worldwide process partners. He has over 10 years of consulting experience playing variety of roles including developer, architect and technical project manager. Ajoy has a MBA from The Ohio State University. You can check out his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ajoyk

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 Microsoft Office 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.

Bryan Sullivan is a security program manager on the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team at Microsoft. He is a frequent speaker at industry events, including Black Hat, BlueHat, and RSA Conference. Bryan is also a published author on Web application security topics. His first book, Ajax Security was published by Addison-Wesley in 2007.

David Treadwell is corporate vice president of Microsoft?s Live Platform Services, a group that?s defining and implementing the next generation of platform services that all Microsoft service-enabled applications and sites will use. These services include unified identity and directory, data synchronization, transport and presence, among others.

A recognized platform innovator, Treadwell most recently helped to start the company?s Windows Live Core effort, an incubation project that?s now a key component of the company?s services platform that will allow the creation of compelling applications by making deep use of network-based information.

Previously, Treadwell ran the .NET Developer Platform team responsible for Microsoft?s managed developer platform, which included the .NET Framework, ASP.NET and other technologies. Prior to his work on .NET, Treadwell was a developer for file server and networking technologies in Windows NT, co-author of the WinSock specification and the NT WinSock implementation, and the development manager for Internet Information Server.

Treadwell earned a bachelor?s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1989 and joined Microsoft later that year. =

Erik Meijer is an architect in the Microsoft SQL server division where he currently works together with the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft Visual Basic language design teams on data integration in programming languages.

Prior to joining Microsoft he was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Erik is one of the designers of the standard functional programming language Haskell98 and more recently the Cw language.

Gabe Brown is a passionate Agile practitioner and has been iterating for the past year focusing on applying best practices. Before coming to Microsoft, he ran a IT consulting practice and worked with a startup to build multimillion dollar eCommerce platforms. He loves learning from my mistakes and taking on big challenges.

Glenn is the PM for the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. Prior to Microsoft, he worked for 10 years in various startups and ISVs wearing many different hats all related to developing software. Glenn has been writing code practically since the time he learned how to ride a bicycle. When he's not writing code, he's working on ways to build better software through learning good software design principles and methodologies. Glenn is a geek at heart and spends a good portion of the rest of this time spreading that geekdom through conferences, and the community through groups such as ALT.NET. When he's not working and playing with technology, he spends his time with his wife and four year old daughter either at their Seattle apartment or at one of the local coffee shops.

Grigori Melnik, PhD is a Senior Program Manager in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft, leading the Process & Engineering focus area, which includes the Microsoft Enterprise Library and Testing Guidance projects. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, and educator with over fifteen years of industrial/research experience. Grigori is a regular contributor to software conferences around the world. He was the Program Chair of the Agile2008 conference. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, software testing, and software economics. Grigori is a member of the IEEE Software Advisory board.

Harry Pierson is the IronPython Program Manager. A ten year Microsoft veteran, Harry has also spent a significant amount of his career focused on Architecture and services. He writes a blog on technology, programming, architecture and occasionally ice hockey at http://devhawk.net.

J.D. Meier is currently a Principal Program Manager on the patterns & practices team at Microsoft. He focuses on patterns and practices for software engineering and ?abilities? (security, performance, ... etc). He's performed more than 750 architecture and design reviews for customers and uses that experience to write books, including Team Development with VSTS, Perf Testing Guidance for Web Apps, Security Engineering Explained, Improving .NET Application Performance, Improving Web Application Security, and Building Secure ASP.NET Apps. In addition to books, J.D.'s authored several knowledge base articles, MSDN Magazine articles, and online MSDN articles.

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.

As corporate vice president of the Office SharePoint Server Group at Microsoft, Jeff Teper is responsible for Office SharePoint Server and its portal, content management, search and line-of-business integration technologies. His team released the latest version, SharePoint Server 2007, with the rest of the 2007 Microsoft Office system in November 2006.

Teper joined Microsoft in 1992 to work with information technology strategists and corporate developers on early Windows NT deployments. He led the creation of a new business group focused on knowledge management that introduced SharePoint Portal Server in 2001, which has since grown to be the leading portal and collaboration product, with over 10,000 customers and partners. Before joining Microsoft, Teper was vice president at an investment firm in New York, where he spent five years managing software development and consulting.

Teper holds a master?s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School and a bachelor?s degree in information systems and finance from New York University where he was class valedictorian. He lives with his wife, Sandy, and their two daughters.

John deVadoss leads the Patterns & Practices team at Microsoft.

He has over 15 years of experience in the software industry; he has been at Microsoft for over 9 years, all of it in the enterprise space ? as a consultant, as a program manager in the distributed applications platform division, as an architect working with some of Microsoft?s key partners, director of architecture strategy and most recently leading technical strategy for the application platform.

Prior to Microsoft he spent many years as a technology consultant in the financial services industry in Silicon Valley.

His areas of interest are broadly in distributed application architectures, data and metadata, systems management and currently on edge architectures (both services and access), but most of all in creating business value from technology investments.

Pat Helland has been working for almost 30 years in the areas of database management, transaction processing, multiprocessors, and distributed, scalable, and fault tolerant systems. For most of the 1980s, Pat worked at Tandem Computers where he was chief architect and implementer of TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility) which provided the transactional support for Tandem?s NonStop Guardian System. TMF is a distributed, scalable, and fault tolerant system which provided the transactions and database logging and recovery for NonStop SQL. From 1991 to 1994, Pat worked at HaL Computers (mostly owned by Fujitsu) and was chief architect of a CC-NUMA (Cache Coherent - Non Uniform Memory Architecture) multiprocessor which implemented shared memory over a very low latency packet based interconnect which was novel in its use of reliable packet deliver under the shared memory cache coherence protocols. In early 1994, Pat moved to Microsoft where he worked on a number of projects starting with Microsoft?s Distributed Transaction Coordinator as well as Microsoft Transaction Server (now COM+). As a part of the early work in what is today Service Oriented Architecture, Pat led the architecture for SQL Service Broker (now a feature of Microsoft SQL Server) which implements high performance exactly once in-order delivery of transactional messages stored inside SQL Server. Pat also worked on the WinFS project working and for a while as an Architect Evangelist. During a two year hiatus from Microsoft, Pat was employed by Amazon computers working on scalable service oriented architectures and, especially, in the area of the catalog and pricing systems. Pat returned to Microsoft in March of 2007 and is now working on a project to support businesses as they develop Rich Internet Applications (running in Silverlight within the browser). He is thrilled to be back at Microsoft!

Peter Provost is a Program Manager for Visual Studio Team Architect. Prior to that, Peter managed 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.

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.

Sam Guckenheimer is the author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. He has 25 years experience as architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager and general manager in the software industry in the US and Europe. Currently, Sam is the Group Product Planner for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. In this capacity, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2003, Sam was Director of Product Line Strategy at Rational Software Corporation, now the Rational Division of IBM. He holds five patents on software lifecycle tools. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Sam is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard University.

Scott Guthrie is corporate vice president of Microsoft?s .NET Developer Division, where he runs the development teams responsible for delivering Microsoft Visual Studio developer tools and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications.

A founding member of the .NET project, Guthrie has played a key role in the design and development of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework since 1999. Guthrie is also responsible for Microsoft?s web server platform and development tools teams. He has also more recently driven the development of Silverlight ? a cross browser, cross platform plug-in for delivering next generation media experiences and rich internet applications for the web.

Today, Guthrie directly manages the development teams that build the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), IIS, Commerce Server and the Visual Studio Tools for Web, Client and Silverlight development.

Guthrie graduated with a degree in computer science from Duke University.

= Stephanie Saad is a Group Manager in Visual Studio Team System. One of the founding members of the Database Edition and a member of the planning team for the VSTS 2008 and Rosario releases, Stephanie today runs the team that delivers dashboards, reports and agile project management tools on top of VSTS.