Allen Hurst is a Principal Consultant and the Assistant Director of Rural Sourcing at Improving Enterprises. As a committed Agilist and Certified ScrumMaster, Allen has spent his career learning, working, leading, and mentoring in a variety of environments, striving to recreate the positive experiences and learn from the negative ones. Along the way, Allen has found a fondness for continuous improvement, Agile values and practices, rapid delivery of quality working software, and well-designed object-oriented systems. Allen is a Computer Science graduate from Texas A&M, the leader of the Aggieland .NET User's Group, an avid practitioner of GTD, and a producer of Improving Podcasts. You can learn a little more about Allen at http://ahurst.com

Amber Shah is a programmer who founded Code Anthem, a way for programmers to prove their coding skills and take control of their careers.

Andrew Connell is an author, instructor and co-founder of Critical Path Training (www.CriticalPathTraining.com), a SharePoint education focused company. Andrew is a six-time recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award (2005-2010) for Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) & Microsoft SharePoint Server. He has authored and contributed to numerous MCMS and SharePoint books over the years including his book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development by WROX. Andrew has spoken on the subject of SharePoint development and WCM at conferences such as TechEd, SharePoint Connections, VSLive, SharePoint Best Practice Conference, SharePoint Evolutions Conference, Office Developer Conference and Microsoft SharePoint Conference in the United States, Australia, England and Spain. Andrew blogs at http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog and on Twitter @andrewconnell.

Andrew Lavinsky is a Managing Consultant with Catapult Systems’ Houston office, where he focuses on implementing Microsoft technologies to enable organizational performance improvement.  As a professional trainer and consultant, Andrew has a diverse background providing services in such industries as oil and gas, health care, finance and IT.  Andrew has lectured extensively on project and IT operations management topics within the US and abroad.

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I am currently an Director of Emerging Technologies  for Catapult Systems and a Microsoft Virtual Technical Specialist for Windows Azure Platform in Houston and have been architecting enterprise solutions for over 11 years. As a an Architect I am responsible for developing and delivering enterprise application architectures for companies looking to modernize or create enterprise applications using Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET, Silverlight, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM / Extended CRM and the Windows Azure Platform.

Ben Floyd has been doing development professionally for 10 years and practicing and teaching secure coding practices for a bit longer than that. He started out in C and assembly and has moved his way through C++, PHP, Java, and a few others. Before becoming a programmer, Ben worked as a network administrator and security analyst. Ben is a Senior Consultant with Improving Enterprises, Inc.

Ben Scheirman is an agile web developer from Houston, TX.  He is  a Certified ScrumMaster, ASP Insider, and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer.  You can read about these topics on his blog, online at http://www.flux88.com.  Check out his upcoming book, ASP.NET MVC in Action by Manning Press at http://manning.com/palermo. 

Networking and chat with like minded people

15+ years in the industry - currently with Microsoft, based in Redmond and has recently spoken at events such TechEd and MVP Summit.  Has published multiple articles and teaches system level development at venues such asbellvuecollege.com and boeing.com

Brandon Satrom is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, based in Austin, TX. He has eleven years of industry experience, splitting his time evenly between consulting/service organizations and internal IT shops before joining Microsoft in June of 2010. A Software and Enterprise Architect, Brandon has worked on projects of all shapes for companies large and small, most recently using technologies such as WCF, WF and ASP.NET MVC with a healthy dose of OSS. Brandon is active in the Austin technology community, both as a participant and supporter of local user groups and as President of the IASA Austin chapter. He lives in Austin with his wife and son and blogs about software architecture and development at http://www.userinexperience.com.

Bret Goldsmith has over 10 years of experience in the software development industry, cutting his teeth on such languages as Delphi and Lisp, eventually garnering expertise in the Java field. He is currently a Banking Build Manager in the JPMorganChase Investment Technology Group. He is a root-cause specialist, emphasizing capacity, scalability, memory, concurrency, and resiliency issues.

Brian Bedard is a consultant with Sogeti who specializes in developing SharePoint solutions. Brian has worked in the IT industry for 11 years while focusing on SharePoint for the last 4 years. Brian is passionate about creating quality SharePoint components that leverage best practices and lessons learned while working on several SharePoint implementations. He is also evaluating SharePoint 2010 features and how the development story will change after release.

Brian Kirkland is a senior software consultant @ Infusion with experience in a wide array of technologies. He has developed software for high-end ultrasound systems, worked as a flight controller in NASA’s Mission Control (where he also built trajectory software), and recently helped Infusion construct an iPhone application. Brian earned a software engineering masters degree from Seattle University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Texas @ Austin

Brian Oxley is a senior developer at the JPMorgan North America Technology Center, focusing on low-latency algorithmic trading systems. Prior to JPMorgan, Brian has worked at MathWorks, ThoughtWorks, VirtuDyne and Enron. He lives in Houston and you can contact him at binkley@alumni.rice.edu and read his blog at http://binkley.blogspot.com.

Even though his educational background is in music and music media, Brian is a thirteen year veteran of Software Development and it is both his profession and his hobby.  He is currently a senior developer with Antares Technology Solutions.

Brian Sullivan is a developer analyst for Falcon Applications, LLC in Shreveport, LA. He got his start in programming maintaining legacy mainframe applications in COBOL at a large trucking company, but quickly realized he needed to find a more productive environment in order to stay sane. He jumped at the opportunity to help transition some of those COBOL applications to .NET, and he hasn't looked back since. He has been working with Microsoft technologies for about 6 years, and is interested in increasing the exposure of agile techniques and methodologies in the Microsoft developer community. He currently runs the Shreveport .NET User Group and speaks frequently at local user groups and regional conferences. Brian is a graduate of Harding University in Searcy, AR. 

Chander Dhall is an independent consultant and an INETA speaker. He has a Masters Degree in computer science with specialization in algorithms, principles and patterns. He likes taking up code challenges and is keen on building high performing modular software. He leads the UTDallas .NET user group and is very excited about bringing up the best academic talent into Microsoft technologies. He has an unbeaten record in yoga and likes rock climbing, jet skiing and other adventure sports in his free time.

Chris Koenig is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas, TX. Prior to joining Microsoft, Chris worked as a Senior Architect on the Architecture Strategy Team for The Capital Group in San Antonio, and as an Architect, Developer and Development Team Lead for the global solution provider Avanade. As a consultant, Chris worked with a variety of clients from many vertical markets, ISVs and other solution providers on enterprise-class Windows and web-based applications. Today, Chris focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. Chris is a devoted husband and father of four awesome children who keep him very busy. In his spare time, Chris serves as Scoutmaster for his oldest son's Troop, and Committee Chair for his youngest sons' Pack. Chris also enjoys traveling, cooking, camping and playing guitar.You can contact Chris through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig, via email at chris.koenig@microsoft.com, or via Windows Live Messenger at chris@koenigweb.com.

Chris Weldon is a Consultant for Improving Enterprises based out of the rural sourcing office in College Station, TX. A Fightin' Texas Aggie, Chris has 10 years of software development experience with expertise in PHP and .Net. As an avid agile enthusiast, Chris has lead teams of software developers using variants of Scrum and XP, encouraging the practice of unit testing with automation and continuous integration through tools such as (N)Ant and MSBuild on a variety of different build systems including Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Atlassian Bamboo, and countless others. He’s also played the roles of ScrumMaster, configuration manager, analyst, and product owner. Most recently, Chris has become an avid SharePoint technology enthusiast, developing unit tested SharePoint solutions for customers that leverage many parts of the .Net stack, especially WCF and WIF.

Claudio Lassala is an independent Software Developer who currently works mostly building Ruby on Rails applications. Previously, he has worked for several years developing .NET applications, presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil, TechEd Europe, and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America, Europe and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C# ever since). He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine and CoDe Magazine. He started the Virtual Brown Bag meetings (www.virtualbrownbag.com) in 2009, and have been hosting it weekly since then.
When not writing code, Claudio is probably rocking out with his band, Descent Into Madness (http://www.descentintomadness.com).

Claudio Lassa-Ben Scheirmanz . Joint presentation . See separate bios

Claudio Lassala-George Mauer  joint presentation. See separate bios.

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Corey Roth is a consultant at Stonebridge specializing in SharePoint solutions in the Oil & Gas Industry. Corey has always focused on rapid adoption of new Microsoft technologies including Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, LINQ, and SilverLight. For his contributions to Visual Studio 200, he was awarded the Microsoft Award for Customer Excellence (ACE). Corey is a member of the .NET Mafia (www.dotnetmafia.com) where he blogs about the latest technology and SharePoint.

Dan Sline has over 16 years in the software industry working with various financial, health care, utilities, energy, and education systems. He currently is a Manager with JPMorganChase in their Investment Bank Technology Group. He has a B.S. in Business Management with Minors in Math and Computing from Ithaca College and a M.S. in Management Information Systems from Texas A&M University. He is also a Sun Certified Developer for the Java 2 Platform (SCJD).

Darren Stokes is the founder of Concurrent Access Software, a software product and services company focused on the delivery of applications that include mobile platform components. Darren has provided independent consultant services to both small and large companies across the US for over 15 years and is the author of HealthSpender for the iPhone.

David Cravey is the lead software developer at Vivicom where he is responsible for the design and architecture of several server, client, and embedded data acquisition products.  He also leads the Houston Visual C++ User Group and was recently awarded a Microsoft MVP for Visual C++.

For nearly thirteen years David has been delivering technical solutions that make sense. He runs a small consulting business helping companies leverage and support SharePoint technologies. When he is not working, he spends time with his beautiful wife and three adorable children. David may be reached at @davidfrette on Twitter.

Senior Developer in Risk Technology. Currently pursuing Masters in Software Engineering at UT (which, not coincidentally, includes a course on data mining).

David Walker is an Senior Application Development Manager with Microsoft. He has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant. He has been an MCP since 2003, MCAD and MCSD since 2005, and was a Microsoft MVP - ASP/ASP.NET from July 2007 – July 2009.

Microsoft MVP Geoff Hiten is a Principal SQL Server consultant for Intellinet. Geoff began working with SQL Server in 1992 with version 4.2 and has used every version since.  He specializes in high-availability and high-performance SQL systems.  Recent projects include: system upgrades, SQL Server platform migrations, performance tuning, custom reporting solutions, virtualization, and database strategy implementations. Geoff is currently on the leadership team of the Atlanta area Microsoft Database Forum Users group (AtlantaMDF) and can be found lurking in the halls at PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Community Summit events. In addition, Geoff has been a Subject Matter Expert for Microsoft Training Curriculum materials and has authored articles, white papers and podcasts on SQL Server.

George Mauer is a .NET developer with a keen interest in maximizing long-term business value through good software development practices. He is particularly interested in Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development, and the SOLID principles. He is currently the Vice President of the Greater New Orleans .NET Usergroup and a regular attendee at gnocode (New Orleans Programmers) and Virtual Alt.NET meetings.
He currently works as a Senior Software Developer at EPS Software/CODE Consulting.

Gregg Sporar has been a software developer for over twenty years, working on projects ranging from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces. His interests include development tools and processes, user interfaces, and performance profiling. Gregg has worked on teams that range from mostly Agile to hideously rigid and is currently Senior Product Manager at Smart Bear Software. He has published several articles, contributed to a couple of books, and has spoken at software developer conferences around the world, including Agile Development Practices, SD West, OSCON, FISL, JavaOne, Jazoon, and TheServerSide Symposium.

Hanu Kommalapati is a Principal Architect at Microsoft  and is part of the Platform Evangelism group. Hanu frequently speaks at customer and industry events and publishes articles and papers for external audience as well as Microsoft internal consumption on various industry trends including Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing. In his current role, he works with Microsoft’s top enterprise customers in North America  in Cloud Computing. Hanu spent 18 years in the IT Industry architecting and evangelizing solutions in business domains including Oil & Gas, Financial Services, high tech manufacturing and Retail. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hanu worked at PriceWaterHouseCoopers in providing architecture solutions to high-tech manufacturing industry. Hanu received his M.S. from IIT Madras.

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Jacob Foshee enjoys coding and teaching. He is a test driven consultant and unproven entrepreneur. A nearly-native Houstonian (aside from a detour in College Station), he believes in elegance, abundance, sustainability, serenity, balance and beauty.
Reach him at UnpluggedDevelopment.com

Jared Bienz is an ISV Architect Advisor with Microsoft, which means he helps companies who write software understand and leverage Microsoft technologies. Jared has been a professional in the software industry since 1995. He’s worked on a wide range of technologies including IP Telephony, Mobile, Web, Composite and Rich Clients. He’s particularly interested in client and UX technologies like WCF, XNA, WPF and Silverlight.

Jason Awbrey been developing software professionally for over 12 years in Dallas, Washington DC and Houston.  He is a board member of North Houston DNUG.  He lives in Spring with his wife and three kids.

Jason is CEO and lead architect of Ingen Systems. He has more than 10 years experience in the development and implementation of web strategies and architecture in varied industries, including financial services, public utilities, energy, hospitality, retail, manufacturing and high-tech. His extensive background incorporates leading companies in data management, portals and content management in Microsoft technologies. He is a 2009 recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.

Prior to founding Ingen Systems, he held positions with White Rock Networks, Covenant Church-Carrollton, TXU Energy, Compucom, Deloitte, Trammell Crow and Tactica Technology Group.  He leads the Dallas DotNetNuke Users Group and is a key speaker at many Microsoft and other technical conferences across the country.

Jason Trent is a native of Oklahoma, but moved to Dallas, TX after college to start working in the energy services industry and then migrated into the consulting area where he started getting exposure to custom .NET development and SharePoint 2003 (and eventually 2007 and 2010).  Jason began working with K2 as a BPM platform in 2006 and re-focused his efforts towards building workflow-based solutions within the SharePoint ecosystem.  Before recently joining K2, Jason was a SharePoint Solutions Architect for a consulting firm in Dallas where he also became a K2 Insider.  Jason still lives in Dallas with his wife, 2 year old daughter and Dachshund.

Jay Smith is a PMO Architect and Evangelist for Tyson Foods, Inc. and a Microsoft ASP .NET MVP. He is one of the founding members of the Northwest Arkansas .Net User’s Group, organizer for the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp, Northwest Arkansas Give Camp, creator of Community Camp, host of User Group Radio and a blogger at http://jaysmith.us.

When Jay is not working to improve his coding skills or building the developer community in Northwest Arkansas he is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and home brewer.

Blog: http://jaysmith.us
Podcast: http://usergroupradio.com

Jeffery Richter is a co-founder of Wintellect, a training, debugging,  and consulting firm dedicated to helping companies build better  software, faster.  Over the years, Jeff has consulted for many  companies including Intel, DreamWorks and Microsoft. In fact, for  Microsoft, he has contributed both design and code to the following  products: Windows (all 32-bit and 64-bit versions), Visual Studio .NET,  Microsoft Office, TerraServer, the .NET Framework, "Longhorn" and  "Indigo". Even today, Jeff is still consulting with Microsoft's .NET  Framework team (since October 1999) and XML Web Services and Messaging  Team ("Indigo") (since January 2003).

He is the author of several  best selling .NET and Win32 programming books including:  The Applied  Microsoft .NET Framework Programming in C# Collection Applied Microsoft  .NET Framework Programming Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming  in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programming Applications for Microsoft  Windows (formerly Advanced Windows) Programming Server-Side Applications  for Microsoft Windows In addition, Jeff has also contributed to many  other books including: Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (Core  Reference), .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Vol. 1:  System, System.Collections

John Ebeling is a long time member of HDNUG. He has served on the board as Secretary and has been our Webmaster for several years. He is an independent Software Developer and has been developing software for more than 15 years. John has been a speaker at the HDNUG group several times as well as at last year's Houston TechFest. John has also been a speaker for the North Houston .NET User Group.

John Paul Cook is a SQL Server MVP and full-time nursing student. His goal is to combine his IT skills with his nursing skills to improve patient outcomes through better processes. Throughout his IT career, John has always been a proponent of better tools to streamline the development process. He is a coauthor of SQL Server MVP Deep Dives and SQL Server MVP Deep Dives Vol. 2.

John Teague has been developing .Net applications since version 1.0. While most of his work has been developing web applications, he tries not focus his attention on specific frameworks or applications stacks. Instead, he focuses on building applications using solid object oriented design principles and patterns with a behavior driven approach.

John is the owner and principle consultant of Avenida Software, a software development, Agile coaching and training firm. He has worked for Fortune 500 companies and small 3 person startups, in a variety of industries including e-commerce/retail, medical and financial. He has worked on building scalable high performance e-commerce websites and international B2B web applications.

He is very active in the .Net and Agile community in Austin, TX. He has organized the Austin Code Camp Conference for the past 3 years and presented several sessions as well. John has also presented private and public training courses on Ajax, Object Oriented Design Principles, and Test Driven Development

He also blogs with the Los Techies crew, http://johnteague.lostechies.com

John Weston is a Senior IT Pro Evangelist for Microsoft in the South Central District of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He supports user groups, make presentations and helps people understand Microsoft Technology.

John has been with Microsoft since the mid 90’s first as a trainer, then as a manager and group manager.  Then John got back to his love of presenting and helping the community in 2005.  If you don’t see him presenting, maybe you will find him sailing around one of the Texas lakes with his kids.

Jonathan Birkholz (@RookieOne) is a continuously improving software craftsman and an active member of the Houston Alt .Net community. Over the last three years, JB has focused on Windows Presentation Foundation with multiple WPF applications in production. He also regularly contributes at the Virtual Brown Bags with Claudio Lassala (snipr.com/virtualaltnet every Thursday 12pm-1pm central) and presents at user groups. JB hosts the Wizards of Smart (http://rookieone.podbean.com/) podcast with Ryan Riley where they talk conversationally about the software development world. JB blogs at www.theabsentmindedcoder.com.

Joy has been harnessing technology to improve business practices and revamp legacy systems for 10 years. She is a SharePoint Administrator working in state government.

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Senior Application Development Consultant with Sparkhound (Currently)

Kevin Griffin is a Technical Evangelist for ComponentOne.  He’s a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, and the leader of the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group.  Additionally, he serves as an INETA mentor for the state of Virginia.  He can often be found speaking at or attending other local user group meetings or code camps.  He enjoys working with new technology, and consistently works on being a better developer and building the best software he can.

Kevin Lee is an iPhone and Web developer in Houston Texas.  He is passionate about software craftsmanship and has been building web applications for the last 12 years.  In 2009 he began to focus on iPhone development and has been diving deep into mobile development for both web and native applications.  Kevin is currently a lead developer at ChaiONE where he works on iOS and Rails projects.

Kyle Kelin works closely with Infusion clients and account teams to define software requirements, analyze business practices, and serve as a technical liaison on a wide range of engagements. Responsible for overseeing Infusion’s Houston office, Kyle leads the development of new accounts in the region, particularly within the oil and gas industry.

 Kyle has a strong technical background rooted in over seven years of experience designing, developing, and implementing Microsoft technologies to provide enterprise-class solutions for many of the world’s largest organizations. Kyle has constructed applications across multiple industries including: consumer electronics, hospitality and tourism, oil and gas, retail, energy, healthcare and life sciences, investment banking, and the public sector. Kyle regularly speaks at user groups and conferences on a variety of technologies and business practices.

 Prior to joining Infusion, Kyle served as a lead application engineer and senior developer for several software consultancies. During this time he delivered solutions for key clients including Thrifty Car Rental and Creative Labs. Kyle also owned and managed a successful independent web development consultancy for several years.

Kyle holds a Master of Arts and Science degree in Management Information Systems and a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from Oklahoma State University. Kyle enjoys spending time with his family, participating in a variety of athletics, and is an avid cyclist.

While working on a Ph.D. in Economics at Rice University, Les Pinter teamed up with Mike Griffin and Bill Radding to market the Magic Wand, the fourth word processor ever developed for microcomputers. In September of 1980, Les sold the source code to a 23-year-old Bill Gates, who used it as the basis for Microsoft Word.

Today Les is President of Pinter Consulting, with teams of .NET developers in several countries in Latin America, specializing in rewriting legacy applications in new technologies. He has written seven books, including "Visual FoxPro to Visual Basic.NET" (Sams, 2006), as well as over 300 articles about software development. Les is an INETA speaker, and has given talks on .NET at universities and at technical conferences all over the world in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Russian. He is also a private pilot.

Lynn Evans first encountered database applications using something called DBMaster on the Apple II Plus in the early 80's. Subsequently he developed  applications in areas such as telecommunications billing, CRM, manufacturing, and medical billing. Along the way he was granted three software patents and was even a CIO for several years.   Currently he is on the faculty at DeVry University where he teaches courses in computer science, business, and statistics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. 

Markus is the CEO of 2 Software companies {runtime.de and pulsd.de} in Germany.  At the age of 19 he started “runtime”  and is now tremendously invested in the cloud + mobile space "pulsd" and has another incubation project "idogene.com" in the works.   Last year alone he has spoken at over 15 events at venues such as http://www.dotnetpro-powerday.de/ and http://www.databasepro-powerdays.de/

Marcus Erickson is the Director of Engineering at Idera. He has researched, architected and written several of Idera's top selling products and is currently focusing his efforts on Idera's SharePoint product line.  Marcus has 20+ years of experience in delivering succesful software products in areas such as SQL Server, Windows administration, security, network administration and programming tools.

Mark Freeman is an independant consultant with over fourteen years experience in various technical roles, including Architecture design, application development, Data modeling, Network administration, Enterprise application integration, and Project management. During his career, he has been involved in several high-profile projects for various clients, including American Insurance Group, National Institutes of Health, Aramark Global Food Services, Pew Charitable Trusts, GMAC Financial, and Microsoft Consulting Services.

He holds several Microsoft technical certifications, has spoken at numerous developer conferences, and has spent countless hours in technical curriculum development as well as a trainer and mentor for colleagues and clients in Microsoft’s newest development technologies and servers. Mark specializes primarily in Microsoft technologies, specifically SharePoint and .Net, and has been working exclusively with the SharePoint 2010 platform for the past 18 months.​

I am a Collaboration Engineer at RackSpace Hosting in San Antonio TX.  It was brought to my attention that you were accepting presentation sessions for Houston Techfest and I would like to submit the following presentation:

Markus is the President and Chief Software Architect of EPS Software Corp. (and it's various properties, such as CODE Consulting, CODE Training, and VFPConversion). He is also the Publisher of CODE Magazine and the co-host of CodeCast. He is a Microsoft RD (Regional Director) and one of the longest-serving MVPs (1996-present). Markus is the founder of other business ventures, such as Tower48 (digital software escrow), Xiine (digital reading), JockTock (sports social network), and more.

Markus has worked on a large number of software projects for some of the world's largest companies (including a number of Fortune 500 companies). Markus has worked as a contractor to the Microsoft Visual Studio team, and has worked closely with various product groups at Microsoft. Besides his activities around CODE Magazine, Markus has been published extensively in practically all large industry publications (mainly in English, but on occasion in German as well). He has received various and numerous awards and recognitions, many related to his active involvement in the community and his regular appearances at events of all sizes. Markus has also been involved in the creation and continued support of various user groups, such as D2SIG (WPF and Silverlight) and HDNUG (.NET).

In his spare time, Markus is an enthusiastic Ice Hockey player (and supporter) as well as an avid windsurfer, traveler, and general enthusiast of sports such as scuba diving or mountain biking. On rainy days Markus either reads, enjoys a computer game, or researches new technologies.

Currently Michael is working as the SharePoint Architect for Waggener Edstrom. Michael has been working almost exclusively with SharePoint for the last seven years. He has been in the software arena professionally for the last 20 years and has worked for companies such as A-dec, Fedex, Intel, NETWARCOM, Deloitte and Touche, HCA, and Vanderbilt. He got his B.E. and M.S. from Vanderbilt University. In his spare time, he likes to kayak and travel. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, CA

Michael Foertsch is the lead architect and software developer for the SharePoint product group at Idera.  Currently, he is working on the Idera SharePoint backup product.  Previously with Idera, he was the lead developer of Idera SQLsafe, a very popular high-performance backup and recovery solution for Microsoft SQL Server.  Michael is a popular speaker with many SharePoint user groups and conferences.

Michael Heydt is Principal Technologist with SunGard Global Service’s Advanced Technologies Group, where he builds energy and financial trading systems using Microsoft.NET and Cloud Services, utilizing rich and natural user interfaces. He is formerly adjunct faculty for the University of Denver, and holds master degrees from Drexel University (Computer Science) and the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School (Technology Management), and has over 25 years of experience building software systems.

Speaking Experience: Cloud Expo East, April 2010
Cloud Expo Europe, June 2010
Microsoft Enterprise Development Conference, 2009
22nd IEEE Software Maintenance Conference, Philadelphia .NET Users Group
New York Microsoft Azure Users Group
Microsoft Azure Road Show, 2011

Publications: "Sharding with SQL Azure" - Microsoft Patterns and Practices
Microsoft Internet Develop

Michael Koby is an experienced technologist who has used and understands a wide variety of technologies and platforms. Michael currently works for a local startup doing Ruby on Rails development.  Michael is also the leader of the Houston Open Development User Group which discusses and gets hands on with many aspects of programming.

Executive Director of Houston Techfest

In addition to founding and running the Houston Techfest Michael has a day job as a Visual studio developer, SQL server developer/dba and sometime Project leader with Sigma Aldich.

Michael has been developing applications for more than 20 years and has been using VB and SQL server since he was part of the original beta test group for Visual basic (Thunder)

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Mike Huguet is an Evangelist for Sparkhound, a Microsoft Managed Gold Partner providing IT services to customers with offices in Baton Rouge and Houston. He is an active member of the IT community as the President of the Baton Rouge .NET User Group, a founding member of the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday and Tech Day event, and an avid speaker at all day conferences and user groups.   Mike was also a member of the Microsoft SharePoint Patterns and Practices Advisory team for their most recent release for SharePoint 2010.   He has a software development background and has been delivering solutions with .NET since Beta 1 and SharePoint since 2006.

In May 2011 Mike Moles joined Perficient as the Director of the Louisiana Business Unit. Prior to joining Perficient Mike served as the Executive Vice President of Systems and Development and CTO Bizzuka. Before either of these two positions Mike helped build a company, Antares Technology Solutions, from the ground up where he served as the President and CEO for almost 21 years.

Mike Oryszak is a SharePoint Server MVP and Principal Consultant with Intellinet in the Portals and Collaboration practice specializing in SharePoint Architecture and Development.  Mike is located in the Raleigh-Durham NC area and has been working with SharePoint since 2002 and developing Enterprise solutions on the Microsoft technology stack since 1996 servicing clients in many industries including Financial, Telecom, Manufacturing, and Government/Non-Profit.  Mike’s favorite SharePoint topic is social computing and how it can be used to increase team and cross-functional collaboration in the enterprise.  In addition he enjoys listening to music and reading about world history.

Mohammad Azam works as a senior consultant at Sogeti. He is the founder of the knowledge based website, HighOnCoding. The website contains over 500 articles, 100+ videos and several podcasts. Mohammad Azam also runs ScreenCastADay where he publishes technical screencasts.

Mohammad Azam is also Microsoft ASP.NET MVP.

Mohammad Azam also contribute to the AspAlliance website. The contributions are in the form of videos and articles. You can check out all the videos at www.aspalliance.com/videos.

Mohammad Azam blogs at www.azamsharp.com.

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Nickolas Landry is a Practice Manager for Infusion Development in the US, a Microsoft Gold Partner which offers quality software development services, developer training and consulting services for large corporations and agencies in the North America, the UK and Dubai (www.infusion.com). Known for his dynamic and engaging style, he is a frequent speaker at major software development conferences worldwide, a member of the INETA and MSDN Canada Speakers Bureaus, and a 6-year Microsoft MVP on Device Application Development. With over 18 years of professional experience, a software architect by trade and a career almost entirely dedicated to Microsoft technologies, Nick specializes in .NET mobility, Bing Maps & Location Intelligence, High-Performance Computing (HPC), Game Development with XNA, and Smart Clients. He wrote multiple articles for CoDe Magazine, published white papers, wrote and several .NET mobility courses for Microsoft, has been a technical editor for many books, and holds several professional certifications from Microsoft and IBM. www.twitter.com/ActiveNick

Nirav Assar is an agile java consultant in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. His expertise includes helping software development teams adopt agile practices, as well as designing and implementing enterprise applications using the principles of object oriented design and clean code. Nirav has worked in a variety of industries including defense, retail, government, and real estate. Along the way, he has worked with many java technologies but his favorites include spring, seam, hibernate, cruisecontrol and ejb3.0. In his spare time, he also enjoys spending time with his family, discussing philosophy and playing soccer.

Jacob Orshalick is independent software consultant, open source enthusiast, and author. He is also owner of Solutionsfit an independent software consulting firm. Jacob aids clients in developing cutting edge software solutions to meet business needs and recently has been actively involved in the JBoss community. Jacob has over eight years 

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Pason's oilfield instrumentation and data acquisition systems bring the wellsite to the office. Our customers rely on us for a complete package of innovative, proprietary technologies and dedicated field support.

Patrick LeBlanc is currently a Business Intelligence Architect for Pragmatic Works. He has worked as a SQL Server DBA for the past 10 years. His experience includes working in the Educational, Advertising, Mortgage, Medical and Financial Industries. He is also the founder of TSQLScripts.com, SQLLunch.com and the President of the Baton Rouge Area SQL Server User Group. Patrick is a regular speaker at various SQL Server community events, including SQL Saturday’s, User Groups and the SQL Lunch. And a SQL Server MVP.

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Peter Tran works for PROS Revenue Management as a Sr. Technical Performance Lead. Peter's expertise is server-side performance tuning and specializes in Oracle and SQL Server performance tuning. Peter works in the development group where he helps benchmark PROS's application against Oracle and SQL Server and recommends performance best practices to the development team. Peter also works closely with PROS's customers to help tune the their environment during deployment.

He currently works with the Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism group as the Community Architect Evangelist for Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, engaging with Architects on the needs and requirements of their role and helping developers to be more involved in the Architecture space.

Becky Isserman has been a SharePoint Developer, since 2005 when she attended the Portal University with Levi, Ray, and Shoup in Springfield, IL. She is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer in SharePoint Server 2010 (MCPD), a SharePoint Server MVP in 2011, and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).  She has been a web designer/developer since she was 15 years old notepad coding HTML 3.0 websites. She enjoys working with SharePoint, because she can perform the roles of administrator, developer, designer, and architect. She has presented at several conferences, code camps, user groups, and SharePoint Saturdays in the past three years. She currently works for Planet Technologies.   She lives with her cat, Gambit, and her boyfriend, Johnny.  If you would like to contact her you can e-mail her at rebecca.isserman@gmail.com or fill out the contact form at her blog http://www.mosslover.com.

For an entire decade, Rich inhabited cubicles at several companies in the same office park, eventually leading a team of developers building data warehouses, web-based BI applications and integrating mission critical systems.  Today, as a Technical Evangelist for ComponentOne, Rich travels the country sharing new technologies with an eye toward the usefulness of these technologies to the poor souls still in their cubicles.  Rich has been working with Azure since the early beta days, with Windows Phone 7 since before you could leave one in a bar, and is co-author of "Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development" from Packt Publishing (http://bit.ly/msazurebook).   Follow Rich's blog at http://c1.ms/c1_richd, or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/rj_dudley.

Rob Vettor is a (former 3-time) C# MVP, INETA Regional Speaker and Application Development Manager for Microsoft, providing reactive support and proactive guidance to development teams for Microsoft Enterprise customers.  Rob has built systems for a number of corporations, including Avanade, Raytheon, American Express and Jack Henry and Associates. Rob lives in Dallas, TX, with his wife, twin sons and three dogs, and is the founder of Hands-On-Coding (http://www.hands-on-coding.net/), a user group in which attendees bring their laptops and learn .NET coding by doing.  You can contact Rob at robvettor@hotmail.com, and check out Rob’s blog at www.robvettor.com.

Robbie Mac Iver grows teams and leaders to achieve improved and more predictable business results for their organizations. Using agile principles and values he creates trustful, collaborative work environments in which teams thrive. Robbie brings business and technology teams together to create innovative business solutions by providing practical, sensible, and effective project leadership.

As the Owner and Principal Consultant of The Mac Iver Group, LP, Robbie offers professional services in agile project management, agile leadership, transition, training and coaching. He is certified by the ScrumAlliance as a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Scrum Professional, is a facilitator of Innovation Games® for Agile Teams, and holds the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute.

As an Agile Advisor with Corpus Optima, Robbie is incorporating agile principles into the organization’s service offerings, delivery methods and internal operations to enhance Corpus Optima’s ability to help clients accelerate and sustain the advanced process and culture transformation practices of Superperformance.

Robbie serves as President the board of directors of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), is a founder of the Houston APLN chapter, and is serving as a Producer for Business and Project Management stage for the Agile2011 conference.

He can be reached at www.robbiemaciver.com or robbie@robbiemaciver.com.

Robert Brackenridge is a faculty member with the department of Visualization at Texas A&M University where he teaches game design and development.  In addition, he founded Houston based Game Factor-e, a company devoted to the introduction of game technologies in applications created for the purpose of learning, improving health, and increasing corporate productivity.

Robert has been in the IT industry for a number of years.  He has worked with SQL Server since 3.51 and all versions since as both a DBA and a developer. He has been involved in MS Office automation since MS Access 1.0. He co-authored a book on MS Access. He has been involved with leading Special Interest Groups at HAL-PC for over 17 years. He currently is the SIG leader of the Database and GUI Design Workshop SIG at HAL-PC. He is the national Technical Director and Data Architect for a Milwaukee based consulting company working here in the Houston area.

Rod Paddock is president and founder of Dash Point Software, Inc. DPSI is an award winning software company based in Seattle, WA . Dash Point Software specializes in application architecture, development and software training. Clients include Six Flags, First Premier Bank, Microsoft, The US Coast Guard and US Navy.

Dash Point specializes in Visual Studio .NET (C# and VB.NET), Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, and SQL Server development. Rod has been a very popular speaker at a wide variety of developer conferences in North America and Europe since 1995. His most recent speaking appearance was at the DevTeach 2005 conference in Montreal Canada . Rod was made an MSDN Canada speaker in 2004 and is currently a Microsoft VB.NET MVP.

Rod is also editor in chief for Code Magazine (www.code-magazine.com) and has written numerous articles and books on software development.

Rod can be contacted via his web site www.dashpoint.com or his blog http://blog.dashpoint.com

Ryan Vice is an enterprise architect with 12 years’ experience building solutions using Microsoft technologies. He’s a MSDN Moderator and 2010, 2011 Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems. He is currently working for Headspring consulting in Austin, Texas on his third enterprise WPF solution. On his last WPF project he was an architect on the Street Smart Edge product from Charles Schwab where he collaborated with Sam Bent who is head of the WPF Data Services team at Microsoft. He’s also a coauthor of the upcoming book  MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in WPF and Silverlight which is due out this fall.

Ryan Richard is a Development Consultant with Sparkhound in Baton Rouge, LA. He has worked in the IT industry since 2000, and has worked primarily with SQL Server and .Net technologies.

Scott J. Peterson is an Enterprise Solution Architect and Developer with Liquid Daffodil, and has been developing software with Microsoft tools and technologies since the late 1980s and has designed, developed and deployed solutions for clients across the globe. Scott was the architect and primary developer of the first MOSS 2007 deployment to go into production worldwide, and has developed solutions for organizations large and small, including Microsoft as part of their global Partners in Learning initiative. Most recently Scott has been developing Windows Phone 7 mobile tools for SharePoint and is a profoundly happily married father of 10 and lives in Richmond, Texas.

Scott Seely is the president of Friseton, LLC, www.friseton.com. From 2002 to 2006, Scott was a developer on the WCF/Indigo team at Microsoft. Scott is a member of the Pluralsight Technical Team (http://www.pluralsight-training.net/microsoft/about/instructor.aspx?name=scott-seely), instructing courses on .NET Distributed Architecture and Windows Communication Foundation. He is an active member of the .NET community in the Chicago area, helping lead the Lake County .NET Users’ Group, organize Code Camps, and speaking at user groups throughout the region.

Scott has been writing about SOAP and REST Web Services since 2000. He has authored and co-authored five books and dozens of articles on the topic. His latest book, Essential Windows Communication Foundation, 2^nd Edition, is due out at late 2010/early 2011. When away from his computer, Scott enjoys cooking, a round of golf, a good beer, and hanging out with his three children and wonderful wife.

Shawn is passionate about building awesome line of business applications and websites with .NET technologies. He is currently a Microsoft C# MVP and founder of http://UserGroup.tv. Read his full bio at http://about.me/shawnweisfeld

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Stephen Nimmo is a Senior Technical Manager with SunGard Global Services based in Houston, Texas. He specializes in leading implementation efforts for mostly large custom application development projects within the energy and financial services sectors. Stephen is currently an MBA student at the University of Houston, with a planned graduation date of May 2012.  His electives specialize in energy trading risk management and energy investment analysis.

Email: stephen.nimmo@sungard.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephennimmo
Twitter: @stephennimmo
Blog: http://stephennimmo.com .

Steve Boldt is a Technical Specialist with K2, a software solutions company that provides a BPM platform for building workflows and process-driven applications. Steve has more than 5 years of extensive experience working with workflow and BPM solutions with Microsoft SharePoint. Over the past 14 years, he's acquired deep technical roots working with the Microsoft stack integrating solutions utilizing such platforms as .Net, BizTalk, Infopath and TFS to name a few. In addition, Steve Boldt is MCTS and MCP Microsoft certified and previously held the role of a Senior Architect, where he was able to develop a workflow solution for a hedge fund company, lead teams of developers and architects, as well as train users on SharePoint and workflow. Steve is currently based in Dallas, TX and in his spare time he enjoys life with his wife of two years.

Steve Whitcomb, MS has been working in IT since the mid-90’s and has implemented and supported SharePoint since WSS 2.0 and SPS2003 for engineering, financial, manufacturing, and oil and gas industry sector companies. Steve also taught a variety of Microsoft courses for several years. He is currently a senior consultant for Microsoft Certified Partner Access Sciences Corporation, where he is busy working on many SharePoint and related technology projects.

Steven is a technical lead and Product Manager at INT where he works on several Java toolkits. These toolkits build GUI displays of complex geoscience and GIS data. Steven has previously worked on database monitoring applications and a peer-to-peer distributed toolkit (InterAgent) that for a time became Sun's JMS implementation.

Steven got his degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas and then from Rice University. Steven has spoken at Houston Techfest and JavaOne several times.

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SunGard Global Services combines business consulting, technology and professional services for financial services firms, energy companies and corporations. Leveraging SunGard’s global delivery model, more than 5,000 employees worldwide help customers manage their complex data needs, optimize end-to-end business processes and assist with systems integration, while providing full application development, maintenance, testing and support services.

Spearheading the HCCUG.org (Houston Cloud Computing User Group).   Evolved with IT/IS over the past 19+ years.  Recently presented at Microsoft's Launch 2010 Dallas and Houston on both the IT Pro and Dev tracks.  Presented at the h-spug.com  on SharePoint 2010 the day after its release.   Founder and Chief Architect of Hybrid Decisions Corp. 

Thomas LeBlanc (MCDBA & MCITP) is a Senior DBA at Amedisys - Baton Rouge, LA. Working in IT field for 21 years developing in COBOL\dBase\FoxPro\VFP\VB 3-6 and .NET(C#). Designing normalized database has become his passion. Full-time DBA work started about 9 years ago for while working at a Paper Mill continuing with IEM and Amedisys. Amedisys has 5 DBAs\Manager supporting VLDBs with Transactional Replication to a DW and Mirroring to a DR site. Tuning and reviewing DB design and SPs are an everyday job at Amedisys. Thomas has presented at the Baton Rouge PASS Chapter and SQLSaturday in Baton Rouge and New York. http://thesmilingdba.blogspot.com/.

A Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and author of So That's How! 2007 Microsoft Office System: Timesavers, Breakthroughs, & Everyday Genius, Tiffany has participated in three large-scale deployments of MOSS 2007 from cradle to grave and consulted more than 400 enterprises on everything from SharePoint customization to Office integration. A popular speaker at SharePoint Saturday events, don't miss this chance to hear from an expert in user acceptance and adoption.

Tim Mitchell is a Microsoft SQL Server consultant, developer, speaker, and trainer.  He has been working with SQL Server for over 7 years, working primarily in database development, business intelligence, ETL/SSIS, and reporting.  He has earned a number of industry certifications and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M at Commerce, and is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP.  Tim is a business intelligence consultant for Artis Consulting in the Dallas, Texas area.

As an active member of the community, Tim has spoken at venues including SQL Saturday and the PASS Business Intelligence SIG, is a board member and speaker at theNorth Texas SQL Server User Group in Dallas, and is a volunteer for PASS.  Tim is an author and forum contributor on SQLServerCentral.com and has published dozens of SQL Server training videos on SQLShare.com.

Tim Rayburn is a Principal Consultant with Improving Enterprises, and a Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems Development.  He has worked with Microsoft technologies for over 13 years, and is the Founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth Connected Systems User Group, the organizer of the Dallas TechFest, and blogger at TimRayburn.net.  When he’s not pursuing the ever moving technology curve, he is an avid gamer, from consoles to table-top RPGs and is the host of a podcast called Radio Free Hommlet.  He welcomes questions about any of the above to tim@timrayburn.net.

Todd Anglin is Chief Evangelist for Telerik, a provider of development tools and user interface components for .NET. Before joining Telerik, he worked for a large Fortune 200 financial services company IT shop where he learned the way of the “Enterprise” – big budgets, big projects, legacy systems, and incessant measurement. He now leverages this Enterprise experience to help Telerik make components that make the lives of all developers as easy as possible. Todd is an active author and speaker in the .NET community, focusing on web development technologies, a Microsoft MVP, founder and President of the North Houston .NET Users Group, and an O'Reilly author.

works as a technology lead for JPMorgan Chase.  He has over 13 years of service to the firm and has worked with a variety of technologies and business lines developing software for financial services.  Since 2000, he has focused mainly on J2EE, web-based applications. Recent technical interests include JavaScript, AJAX, Ext Js, and modern architectures that treat the web page as the application.  In 2009 , he was  member of the inaugural class of Rates Lead Engineers.  Todd lives in a suburb of Houston with his wife Kim and three daughters Ella, Claire, and Lucy. When not working or playing with his kids, he enjoys writing music and taking an occasional snowboarding trip.  Todd can be reached at todd.kegley@gmail.com.

Tom is a Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint. He is passionate about online collaboration technologies and loves being active in the SharePoint Community. Tom has been blogging about SharePoint for the last 3 years after certifying on the 2007 platform. Before SharePoint, Tom has spent 13 years in the internet industry developing products and web site functionality in Perl, C++, Java, VB.Net and C#. With SharePoint, Tom prefers an Out of the Box approach to deployment.

Tony Champion is the principal solution consultant for CDS, a software solution company and member of the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Program and a PivotViewer ISV.  Tony has been developing in Microsoft technologies since 1996 and has experience in web applications, desktop applications, graphics, and real-time software.  He is currently focused on providing professional solutions and training in the latest technologies, including Silverlight, WPF, SharePoint, AJAX, and WCF.

Trevor Barkhouse is an Escalation DBA for Terremark Worldwide, Inc., a leading global provider of IT infrastructure services.  His passions are automation, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.  Trevor is very active in the community. In addition to recently finishing a term on the board of directors of the North Texas SQL Server Users Group, he has spoken at many user group meetings, four SQLSaturday events, and at the 2009 PASS Community Summit.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences. He authored .NET Gotchas (O'Reilly), and co-authored the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer (Pragmatic Bookshelf). His most recent book is Programming Groovy (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Wallace B. "Wally" McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1991. He has done consulting and development for such organizations as The United States Department of Education, Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. Wally has been working with the .NET Framework since the first public alpha in the summer of 2000. Wally McClure specializes in building applications that have large numbers of users and large amounts of data, as well as user interface specific technologies, such as AJAX and now the iPhone. He is a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, member of the national INETA Speaker’s Bureau, author of six programming books, and a partner in Scalable Development, Inc. Wally authored the first book that was published for MonoTouch development for the iPhone in November, 2009.

You can read Wally's blog at http://www.morewally.com/. Wally also co-hosts the ASP.NET Podcast. You can listen to it at http://www.aspnetpodcast.com.

Weiping Wang is a Senior Architect with PROS Pricing, a software vendor providing profitability management and optimization solutions.  Weiping has been developing large scale, high performance software using enterprise Java technology for the past 10+ years.  Prior to joining PROS Pricing, Weiping worked for other software companies such as Stoner Associates and BMC Software.

WhitakerIT is an IT staffing firm, headquartered in Houston, TX. We provide solutions for companies and candidates who want the most from todays' information technologies. In business since 1993, we have extensive experience in the industry and have synthesized a unique and successful methodology that is working for our clients and candidates alike:

William Assaf, MCITP-DD, is a team lead database developer and architect at Sparkhound, Inc. in Baton Rouge, LA. Started off as a .net developer and moved into database administration and architecture, and has been lead db designer on major application and DW projects in the private and public sectors. He blogs about SQL at sqltact.com and is president of the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group. He's helping organize SQL Saturday in Baton Rouge in August and is active in the Baton Rouge IT scene.

For over 15 years Zain has been teaching and consulting on the latest Microsoft technologies.  He's been a Consultant and Microsoft Certified Trainer since 1995 and holds all major Microsoft certifications.
He is the creator of Virtual World Evangelism (VWE) which is an effort to build communities in virtual places like Facebook, Second Life, and OpenSim.  He is not only a proponent of the community aspect of virtual worlds but also is a supporter of the myriad business applications that these new mediums offer.  Zain's efforts have been featured by eWeek, Redmond Developer News, and many others.  He has been interviewed by Forrester Research, ThinkBalm, UgoTrade, Gartner, and the Science Channel for his work with virtual world communities.  He is a frequent speaker at events in Second Life, Facebook, and other virtual worlds. And lectures world-wide to evangelize the future of this exciting new medium.