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
[email protected]. 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 VisualCafe 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.
