Bill Evjen is an active proponent of .NET
technologies and community-based learning initiatives for .NET. He
has been actively involved with .NET since the first bits were
released in 2000. In the same year, Bill founded the St. Louis .NET
User Group (www.stlnet.org), one of the world''s first such groups.
Bill is also the founder and former executive director of the
International .NET Association (www.ineta.org), which represents
more than 450,000 members worldwide.
Based in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Bill is an acclaimed author
(more than 13 books to date) and speaker on ASP.NET and XML Web
services. He has written or co-written
Professional C# 2005;
Professional VB 2005; and the best-selling
Professional
ASP.NET 2.0, as well as
ASP.NET Professional Secrets, XML
Web Services for ASP.NET, Web Services Enhancements: Understanding
the WSE for Enterprise Applications, Visual Basic .NET Bible,
and more. In addition to writing, Bill is a speaker at numerous
conferences, including DevConnections, VSLive, and TechEd. Along
with these items, Bill works closely with Microsoft as a Microsoft
Regional Director and he has received the Microsoft MVP designation
for many years.
Bill is the technical Architect for Lipper (www.lipperweb.com), a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Reuters, the international news and
financial services company. He graduated from Western Washington
University in Bellingham, Washington, with a Russian language
degree. When he isn''t tinkering on the computer, he can usually be
found at his summer house in Toivakka, Finland. You can reach Bill
at evjen@yahoo.com. He presently keeps his weblog,
www.geekswithblogs.net/evjen.
Kent Sharkey is an independent consultant who
lives and codes in the midst of the wilds of Vancouver Island.
Before going solo, Kent worked at Microsoft as a technical
Evangelist and Content Strategist, promoting the use of .NET
technologies. When not coding or writing, he''s off hiking, biking,
or canoeing (or exploring the wilds of Azeroth). He shares his
house with his wife, Margaret, and two "8220;Children," Squirrel
and Cica.
Thiru Thangarathinam is a Microsoft MVP who
specializes in architecting, designing, and developing distributed
enterprise class applications using .NET-related technologies. He
is the author of the books Professional ASP.NET 2.0 XML
and Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Databases from Wrox press and
has coauthored a number of books on .NET-related technologies. He
is a frequent contributor to leading technology-related online
publications.
Michael Kay is widely known in the XML world as
the developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor, and as the
editor of the XSLT 2.0 specification. His Wrox books XSLT 2.0
Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's
Reference are regarded as the definitive guides to these
languages. Michael runs his own company, Saxonica, which develops
the Saxon technology and provides support and consultancy for XSLT
and XQuery users. His background is as a software designer creating
database products for a mainframe manufacturer. He is a Fellow of
the British Computer Society and a Visiting Fellow at the
University of Reading (UK). In his spare time he sings and plays
croquet.
Alessandro Vernet co-founded Orbeon in 1999,
which makes Orbeon Forms, an open source product to build and
deploy sophisticated forms on the Web. He is one of the authors of
Professional Web 2.0 Programming and is a member of two
W3C Working Groups: the XForms and XML Processing Model Working
Groups. Before co-founding Orbeon, Alessandro was at Symantec as
part of the VisualCafé team, working on their next-generation RAD
for web applications. He holds an MS/CS from the Swiss Institute of
Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and since 1998 lives in
the incredibly energetic Silicon Valley.
Sam Ferguson is a Project Manager with API
Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, based in Glasgow,
Scotland. Sam, who lives in Ayrshire, specializes in SQL Server,
Microsoft Office Server System 2007, .NET, and all XML-related
technologies. In what little spare time he has, Sam enjoys playing
golf and is an avid fan of the Glasgow Rangers.