Upon leaving school Gary went into the banking industry where he worked his way to (near) the top, leading a special projects group tasked with solving the problem of how America's low paid could afford to buy housing. Having made a fortune by selling mortgages to people whom he knew could not hope to repay them, he then made a second fortune selling on that debt to large financial institutions. Shortly after that Gary was invited to leave the banking industry and now works as a technical evangelist for Developer Express. Gary is committed to the "community" in the UK, and further afield, and can often be found speaking at community events up and down the country; except DDD7, but he doesn't care about that at all, nope not one bit.

 

Ben Hall is a UK C# developer\tester with a strong passion for software development and loves writing code. Ben works at Red Gate Software as a Test Engineer and enjoys exploring different ways of testing software, including both manual and automated testing, focusing on the best ways to test different types of applications. Ben is a C# MVP and maintains a blog at Blog.BenHall.me.uk.

 

Chris is regularly caught by his wife browsing internet sites at 2.00am in the morning. Sadly he is always looking at .NET sites rather than the haunts frequented by his peers. He is an MVP, runs NxtGenUG Cambridge, does lots of presenting at various conferences and user groups, blogging and oh yeah he has a day job also.

 

Steven Sanderson is an independent software developer, trainer, and consultant based in Bristol, UK, specialising in Microsoft web technologies. He's currently putting the finishing touches to his first book, "Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework" (Apress), while fitting in as much contract work as he can find time for. His web development blog is at http://blog.codeville.net/.

 

Richard is the Engineering Director of Black Marble Ltd a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England. Black Marble specialises in BizTalk & SharePoint based business automation. As Engineering Director Richard is responsible for the delivery of systems and tools to allow the company, and their clients, to deliver solutions efficiently. All Black Mable's development activity is underpinned by Team System using Scrum as a process model. Richard is a Certified Scrum master. Richard is a regular presenter at community events in the UK and Ireland (and the rest of the world given a chance) where his most common subject is software testing and development process.

 

MD of Black Marble, Architecture MVP, and CSD Advisor. Robert regularly presents on emergent technologies, security as well as BizTalk and Oslo. Wrox Press published Robert’s Ebrief “SOA and ESB Architecture with BizTalk” in 2008. In 2007, he presented at TechEd Europe Developers, and in 2008 he was an 'Ask the Expert' for BizTalk at TechED US and TechED Europe.

 

My background is in Point of sale for the retail sector, in particular petroleum. I have been working as a developer as long as I can remember, in fact my first development job was as 15, while I was still at school! I worked for 10 years at Wella GB as a developer developing systems for hairdressers before doing 4 years designing hardware for various platforms. I even had a hand in designing a 286 motherboard! I then worked for Meggitt Petroleum Systems as a Technical Architect designing Point of Sale terminals and Back Office systems for major oil companies across the world. I have been lucky enough to visit 26 countries as diverse as South Africa and Japan doing this. I developed some desktop and enterprise level applications using an obscure 4GL called Omnis. Since then I have been working with .NET since its inception and was part of the beta program for 1.0 and have built a web site in ASP.NET. Numerous projects later I have sepcialised in media devices for XP and XP embedded and media center, along with mobile applications for devices ranging from symbian hardware through Pocket PC to Windows Mobile 5.0, and the Vista versions! I am also a pilot and am fortunate to have an aeroplane at Coventry airport, at the flying club. I can usually be found on the airfield most Saturdays either flying the 'plane if the weathers good, or flying the bar if its not! If you would like to read more about what I get up to, you could check out my blog at www.johnnysblog.net.

 

Richard Costall (MVP, MCSD.NET) has over 19 years development experience and works for 1st Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner, and the UK's leading software solution for Financial Adviser and Intermediaries, designing and implementing IFA applications in the financial services sector. Previously specializing in VB, XML/XSLT, COM, ASP and MSMQ, Richard now lives and breathes the awesome world of .Net and in particular ASP.NET (including 2.0) Richard spent 5 1/2 years as the Midlands regional coordinator for VBUG (Visual Basic User Group) before co-founding NxtGenUG, the innovative UK user group for Microsoft Technologies. Richard has written articles for publications such as ASP.NET Pro and International Developer Magazines and also co-authored the Apress title Professional MSMQ. He speaks a local user groups, Microsoft Conferences/Product launches, TechED Europe and the hugely successful DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Events. When not in .Net land, Richard enjoys relaxing at home with his wife and two sons, playing on the XBOX 360 or ultimately jetting off to Walt Disney World, Florida, for a trip on the Tower of Terror.

 

Marc has spent the last decade working for RM (the UK's largest provider of IT to the education market), writing software on the Microsoft platform, in particular .NET. A keen community contributor via forums (most noticeably of late Stack Overflow), community projects (protobuf-net, HyperDescriptor, MiscUtil [with Jon Skeet]), and user groups (NxtGenUG); Marc was awarded the MVP award (Visual C#) in 2008.

 

The mere mention of jQuery gets George all enthused. He's a contract front-end web developer who's passionate about web dev, usability and js. He has spent many years working on accessible, standards compliant sites with progressive enhancement and unobtrusive javascript. Recent works include sites and web apps for BBC Doctor Who, Nationwide, Waterstones, HMV, and Comet Electricals, with bucketloads of jQuery.

 

Jimmy is the Principal Software Engineer at Symantec SaaS Division in Gloucester.  He smoothly moved to .NET 1.1 from Delphi avoiding any contacts with C++ and Visual Basic. After spending a quite few years on web applications he joined MessageLabs and used an opportinity to dive deep into SOA world. Since then Jimmy spends all his time working with web services and SOA architecture and design. As the Principal Software Engineer, Jimmy is now responsible for architecture and delivery of new projects based on web services. He is founder of the Gloucestershire .NET User Group, known as GL.net.

 

Kris Athi is a recent Computer Science graduate and former Microsoft Student Partner. Now working for CM Group, Kris mainly focuses on graphical technologies such as WPF and Silverlight. By night, Kris leads a double life as an avid gamer with a keen interest in video game development.
 

Guy is an MVP in ASP.NET. He is the author of ".NET Internationalization" published by Addison-Wesley (http://www.dotneti18n.com). He is a Microsoft Certified Professional developer, author, trainer and speaker, has spoken at many European and US conferences, is the winner of the NxtGen Best Presentation 2006/2007, has been voted best speaker three times and is an INETA Speaker. He runs The .NET Developer Network (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com), a free .NET user group in the South West of England. He is the author of C#/.NET courseware and much of the official Borland courseware including courses on COM and ADO. He has written over 50 articles for numerous magazines, has co-authored an application development book and is the author of the ADO chapter of "Mastering Delphi 6". You can read his blog at http://www.guysmithferrier.com.