Featured Speakers

Robert Beauchemin

Bob Beauchemin is a database-centric application practitioner and architect, instructor, course author, writer, and Director of Developer Skills for SQLskills. Over the past few years he's been writing and teaching his SQL Server 2005 and 2008 courses to students worldwide through the Ascend program, the Metro (SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart) program, and client-centric classes. He is lead author of the books "A Developer's Guide to SQL Server 2005" and "A First Look at SQL Server 2005 For Developers", author of "Essential ADO.NET" and has written articles on SQL Server and other databases, database security, ADO.NET, and OLE DB for MSDN, SQL Server Magazine, and others.

David Chappell

David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates in San Francisco, California. Through his speaking, writing, and consulting, he helps people around the world understand, use, and make better decisions about new technologies. David has been the keynote speaker for many conferences and events, and his seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

Kurt Claeys

Kurt is a Trainer, Coach, Speaker and Consultant on Cloud related .NET development technologies. As well as being an MVP and MCT, Kurt is the INETA Country Lead for Belgium. Kurt describes himself as both Geek and Evangelist, currently working as Senior .NET SOA architect and lead developer with focus on WCF/WF/BizTalk, and Trainer (MCT) on certification tracks, BizTalk and custom SOA (WCF/WF) courses. Kurt won the speaker idol award at Tech·Ed EMEA 2008. He has been an Ask-the-Expert, Lab Proctor and Speaker at a variety of events, including Tech·Ed North America 2008 and 2009, Belgian TechDays 2007 and 2009, Devdays 09 Netherlands, Tech·Ed EMEA 2008, and Virtual TechDays and Virtual MCT Summit. Kurt has also been delivering sessions for community events since 2005. He is a regular contributor to .NET Magazine (Dutch). Kurt's Blog: www.devitect.net

John Craddock

John has designed and implemented computing systems ranging from high-speed industrial controllers through to distributed IT systems with a focus on security and high-availability. A key player in many IT projects for industry leaders including Microsoft, the UK Government and multi-nationals that require optimised IT systems. Developed technical training courses that have been published worldwide, co-authored a highly successful book on Microsoft Active Directory Internals, presents regularly at major international conferences including, TechEd, ITForum and European summits. John can be engaged as a consultant or booked for speaking engagements through XTSeminars. www.xtseminars.co.uk

Stephanie Cuthbertson

Stephanie Saad Cuthbertson is one of the Group Program Managers in Team Foundation Server and one of the product planners for the VSTS 2010 release. She's worked on Visual Studio for the past 6 years, 4 of them on Team System. She graduated from Brown University in 1998 and worked at the startup Acquantive advertising before joining Microsoft in 2001.

Tess Ferrandez

Tess has worked for Microsoft for over 10 years, debugging and troubleshooting every percievable ASP.NET issue since the alpha of .net framework 1.0. She works mostly on production level issues like hangs, performance issues, memory leaks and crashes and loves to share her knowledge in this area on her blog.

Kimmo Forss

Kimmo Forss is an architect in the Microsoft Online Services Group, with particular focus on SharePoint® Products and Technologies. Previously, Kimmo served as a Lead Architect for Microsoft Enterprise Services, helping customers and partners design and build SharePoint-based solutions. He specializes in architecture, coexistence, and migration. Kimmo has a long experience on working with and migrating Lotus Domino based solutions. Kimmo has been in the IT business professionally since 1994, prior to that he has worked as a “freelance” programmer whilst studying for his master's (science) examination at the Åbo Akademi university. From 1994 to 2001 Kimmo worked for a Finnish ISV, his roles and responsibilities included the planning, developing of different solutions based either on the Microsoft or the Lotus Domino platform Kimmo also works closely with internal Microsoft product and marketing teams. He is a frequent speaker and trainer at industry conferences such as Tech·Ed, IT Forum, and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference.

Kim Griffiths

Kim Griffiths is a product manager in the Genuine Windows Product Marketing group, focusing on commercial and public sector customers. Kim has worked at Microsoft for four and a half years. She joined the Genuine Windows team after working with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) where she was an infrastructure consultant specializing in Active Directory, security, and Microsoft Exchange . Overall, Kim has more than 15 years of experience working in IT with enterprise and government customers.

Miha Kralj

Rafal Lukawiecki

In his role as Strategic Consultant at Project Botticelli Ltd, Rafal Lukawiecki is responsible for analyzing and forecasting trends in the field of Information Technology. Rafal works closely with large teams of developers and consultants, and with investors and their boards of directors. He specializes in several areas: business intelligence and data mining, IT architecture models, security and cryptography, and management of solution delivery. Rafal is a popular and highly rated speaker at Microsoft events. His uniquely energetic speaking style should keep you engaged no matter how complex the subject.

Andy Malone

Andy Malone (Microsoft MVP, MCT) is the CEO of Quality Training Ltd and founder of both the Dive Deeper Technology and Cybercrime Security events. Based in Scotland, Andy is a popular international event speaker and technology evangelist with over 15 years experience. Andy was also the 2006 winner of the Microsoft TechEd Speaker Idol contest. Andy has delivered technical and security content to thousands of delegates worldwide at various technical conferences, such as Microsoft TechEd, Connections and Tech-days. His passionate style of delivery, combined with a sense of fun has become his trademark.Although his primary focus is for security. Andy loves to talk about the Windows platform, Exchange and Office technologies. And with knowledge dating back to the MS-DOS 2 and Windows 2.0 era there is often an interesting story to be told. But technology never sleeps and Andy continues to work with the Microsoft product teams to create and deliver ground breaking material on Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and beyond. For 2009/10 Andy is scheduled to deliver content in Europe, the Middle East, Russia and the US to name but a few. Andy’s blog: http://blogs.quality-training.co.uk/blog

Mark Minasi

Mark Minasi is a best-selling author, popular technology columnist, commentator, keynote speaker, and IT consultant. He first got the chance to play with a computer at a university class in 1973. At that time, he learned two things: First, computers are neat. (People still said "neat" back in 1973. Hey, it was back in the 20th Century.) Second, many technical people are very nice folks, but they can sure put you to sleep in an instant while explaining technical things. Mark transformed those two insights into a career making computers and networking easier and more fun to understand. He's done that by writing over a thousand computer columns, several dozen best-selling technical books, and explaining operating system and networking planning, installation, maintenance and repair to crowds from two to two thousand. An independent voice hailed as "Favorite Technical Author" by CertCities four times out of four, Mark has the unusual ability to take even the most technical topics, filter out the hype and explain them in plain English. Perhaps that's why when TechTarget hired him to deliver a webcast on PC tuning, he drew three times as many attendees as any of their previous webcasts, crashing Yahoo's servers, and why he's been hired to deliver keynote addresses at hundreds of techie conferences around the world. Mark is probably best known for his "Mastering Windows Server" and "Complete PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide" books, both of which have seen more than 12 editions and sold over a million copies. An audience member at a recent talk remarked that he believed that Mark could "do a talk on watching paint dry that would be so good that people would be motivated to go home and paint a wall just to experience the joy of drying paint." While this has led to many very tempting offers from the likes of Sherwin-Williams and Behr, he's decided to stay with his first love... technology. Mark's humorous, provocative and yet informative style makes him a favorite of audiences around the world. Mark's firm, MR&D, is based in Pungo, a town in Virginia's Tidewater area which is distinguished by having one and only one traffic light.

Roy Osherove

Roy works as the chief architect at Typemock - enabling the next generation of unit testing tools for .NET (Typemock.com) . Roy has been involved in software development for over 10 years and is the author of the book "The Art of Unit Testing". He speaks regularly at Microsoft Conferences such as Tech·Ed and DevTeach, and writes regularly on his blog, www.ISerializable.com.

Maciej Pilecki

Maciej Pilecki is a SQL Server Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Microsoft Certified Trainer and Consultant with Project Botticelli. He has several years of international experience in software development, specializing in Microsoft SQL Server database applications. In the past he also used to work as a network administrator and IT security consultant. He specializes in database and application development, high availability, security and administration. He travels around the world delivering consulting services and conference sessions covering many aspects of SQL Server and application development.

Mark Russinovich

Mark Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division working on Windows architecture. Russinovich joined Microsoft when Microsoft acquired Winternals software, the company he cofounded in 1996 and where he worked as Chief Software Architect. He is also cofounder of Microsoft Windows Sysinternals (http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals), where he writes and publishes dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Process Monitor, Process Explorer and Autoruns. Russinovich coauthored "Inside Windows 2000" and "Windows Internals," both from Microsoft Press, is a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet and Magazine and Windows IT Pro Magazine, and has written dozens of articles on Windows internals. He has been a featured speaker at major industry conferences around the world, including Microsoft's Tech·Ed, IT Forum, and Professional Developer's Conference, as well as Windows Connections, Windev, and TechMentor, and has taught Windows internals, troubleshooting and file system and device driver development to companies worldwide, including Microsoft.

Ilse Van Criekinge

Ilse Van Criekinge has recently joined Microsoft as a Technology Advisor - Microsoft Unified Communications. Before that she worked as an ICT Trainer and Consultant for Global Knowledge. Being an MCT, Ilse has offered several companies guidance in their Exchange and MOM deployments, as well as auditing the disaster recovery capabilities in their mail environment. During the last three year she has ignited many IT Professionals with the power of Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, by delivering training and by co-founding a new user group Pro-Exchange in Belgium, focused on Microsoft Unified Communications, http://www.proexchange.be. Ilse has held the Exchange MVP award for three years since April 2007. Ilse has co-authored an Exchange Exam Prep Guide, written Sapien's Exchange Management Shell: TFM book, and is looking forward to the new challenges on the Microsoft Unified Communications roadmap. In 2007, Ilse won the Speaker Idol award at Tech·Ed EMEA IT Professionals, appearing as a speaker at Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 and she is back again this year! Ilse is located in Belgium, where she lives together with Serge and their son Robin.