Development Tools Ecosystem Summit 2009 Speakers

Aaron Bjork (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Aaron Bjork is a program manager on the Team Foundation Server Process team responsible for the process templates and reporting solutions shipped with the product.

Gregg Boer (Principal Program Manager, Microsoft)
Gregg Boer has over 22 years experience in the software industry. He has worked primarily first as a developer, later as a software project manager, while at times performing the roles of QA manager, business analyst, trainer, and process consultant. He joined Microsoft and the Team Foundation Server team four years ago because he saw TFS as a critical tool that could dramatically improve the way people develop software. Gregg designs the work item tracking features in TFS with the vision that TFS is so much more than tracking items, but eliminating the friction that so often plagues software engineers when working on a software projects. Aaron Bjork is a program manager on the Team Foundation Server Process team responsible for the process templates and reporting solutions shipped with the product.

Mark Boulter (Principal Program Manager, Microsoft)
Mark Boulter is a program manager on the WPF and Silverlight Designer team (aka "Cider"). Mark has worked on UI frameworks and designer technologies at Microsoft for longer than he is willing to admit. Before that he worked at ParcPlace Systems and IBM and he will bore you with "Smalltalk did that while you were still in diapers" stories at the drop of a hat. In his spare time Mark listens to post punk industrial new wave and herds cats.

Brian Crawford (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Brian Crawford is a software architect and has worked at Microsoft for over 15 years, mostly in diagnostic tools, starting with the debugger in VC++ 1.0 for Windows 3.1 through to historical debugging in Dev10. He was one of the main contributors to the current Visual Studio debugger platform and the new historical debugger platform extensibility.

ChrisGranger (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Chris Granger is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Platform team who oversees many of the technical aspects of the Editor including the extensibility model.  As such, his job is to make sure others can go beyond what's in the box, make Visual Studio work the way they do, and add functionality that we couldn't even dream of. In other words, you can think of him as the guy working for you. 

Larry Guger (Online Business Systems)
Larry Guger has been working with the .NET Framework for client organizations since late 2001, shortly before the final release of .NET 1.0. Larry's dedication to Microsoft technologies has proven itself in the form of invitations from Microsoft to join exclusive partner groups, the Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle and the Connected Technologies Advisors as well as being awarded an MVP in Team Systems. Larry has been evangelizing Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server since it was first released to the public in 2006. Larry's keen interest in process and methodology couples extremely well with the vision Microsoft holds for Visual Studio Team System and Application Lifecycle Management. Larry holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba, Canada and is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for both Team Foundation Server and BizTalk Server.

Jeff Hadtfield (The Code Project)
Jeff has worked with developers and developer communities for nearly twenty years. He has helped companies market to developers for much of that time, even putting in his own tenure as a software marketer. As the current publisher of The Code Project (www.codeproject.com) (and former editor and publisher of Visual Studio Magazine, Visual Basic Programmers Journal, etc.), he's uniquely qualified to help software companies of all sizes reach developers. No matter what size company and no matter what size budget, he knows ways to help build awareness, engender trust and ultimately drive sales.

Nathan Halstead (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Nathan Halstead is the Program Manager responsible for the Visual Studio 2010 redistributable shells. Over the past two years, Nathan has worked to improve the setup, licensing, diagnostic, and extensibility technologies at the core of the Visual Studio architecture. Prior to his work with the Visual Studio team, Nathan worked with the Office Business Applications team at Microsoft to deliver a version 1 product that enabled large enterprises to model, deploy, and track key business data across their various subsidiaries. Nathan holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. In his spare time, Nathan has been spotted playing amateur hockey at local ice rinks or falling gracefully down mountains covered in snow in an attempt to ski.

Phil Hoff (Software Development Engineer, Microsoft)
Phil Hoff graduated from Oregon State University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Phil spent six and a half years at Intel developing semiconductor manufacturing equipment control software. Phil is now a Software Development Engineer in the Business Applications group and has been with Microsoft for nearly three years. Phil is a member of the development team responsible for the creation of SharePoint tooling, designers, and extensibility for Visual Studio 2010.

Wes Hutchins (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Weston Hutchins started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and joined full-time in 2006 after receiving a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida.  For the past year, he's been working as a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Shell team which is responsible for the core IDE services and extensibility architecture as well as the overall look and feel of Visual Studio. He has worked extensively with the Ecosystem team during the Visual Studio 2010 product cycle to design the New Project Dialog and the Extension Manager. Prior to that, he was the SKU manager for the Visual Studio Express products performing a variety of duties around Express feature development and release activities. 

Rico Mariani (Partner Architect, Microsoft)
Rico Mariani began his career at Microsoft in 1988, working on language products beginning with Microsoft® C version 6.0, and contributed there until the release of the Microsoft Visual C++® version 5.0 development system. In 1995, Rico became development manager for what was to become the "Sidewalk" project, which started his 7 years of platform work on various MSN technologies. In the summer of 2002, Rico returned to the Developer Division to as a Performance Architect on the CLR team.  His performance work led to his most recent assignment as Chief Architect of Visual Studio. Rico's interests include compilers and language theory, databases, 3-D art, and good fiction.

Justin Marks (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Justin Marks started at Microsoft in 2002 after receiving his BS in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT. He has worked on MSN.com as a Systems Engineer, Windows as a Software Design Engineer in Test, and now Visual Studio as a Program Manager. As a PM on the Diagnostics team, Justin has been working on the Historical Debugger feature for the next release of Visual Studio 2010.

Jean-Marc Prieur (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Jean-Marc Prieur is the Program Manager of Microsoft's Visual Studio Extensibility Team. After studying at L’Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité (Supelec), and gaining a Master of Science at Caltech (focusing on Concurrent Computing and Computational Neural Systems), Jean-Marc worked for the French Navy managing Operational Research and Simulation. He is passionate about software modeling, in particular graphical software modeling, meta-modeling and code generating. He is also an extremely passionate early adopter of DSL Tools. Jean-Marc founded the French DSL community with a group of friends, which ran several labs, workshops on DSL Tools, and a VSX Day in Paris. He joined the Cambridge Visual Studio Ecosystem Team in March 2008 as a Program Manager, and is working with the VSX team to add new features to DSL Tools and enhancing the Visual Studio SDK.

István Novak (VSX Insider, Grepton Informatics)
István Novak is a distinguished engineer and a partner of Grepton Informatics Ltd. in Hungary. He's been working with Microsoft technologies since the university years. In the last thirteen years István worked on several enterprise projects as architect, consultant and technology lead, mainly for telecommunication companies.

In the last year István received an MVP title (Visual C#) from Microsoft, in November he started the LearnVSXNow! project to share his experiences with studying Visual Studio Extensibility. He is the author of the first Hungarian book about the .NET framework and many deep dives on .NET and related technologies. István has a Master of Sciences degree in Software Engineering from the Technical University of Budapest and he finished his doctoral studies there with a thesis on software technology.

Unni Ravindranathan (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Unni Ravindranathan has been working on Expression Blend ever since the early days of the product. In addition to focusing on enabling Blend to be a tool that will allow 3rd party developers to deliver innovations that eventually enable our users - designers - to push the boundaries of UX, Unni has worked on a large number of the product features like the data binding system, property grid, control editing, resource management, project system, and TFS support. Unni holds a Masters in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.

Karl Shifflett (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Karl Shifflett is a software architect, former Microsoft MVP, current Code Project MVP and MCAD from Bellevue, Washington. He is currently working for Microsoft on the Cider Team as a Program Manager II. He has been designing & developing business applications since 1989 and transitioned to .NET in March of 2003. In April of 2007 he joined the list of WPF and Microsoft Expression fanatics & evangelists. He is a member of Team Mole that delivered Mole Visualizer For Visual Studio to the world. He is the author of the Visual Studio AddIn XAML Power Toys and loves WPF LOB.

Brad Sullivan (Program Manager, Microsoft)
Brad Sullivan graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. and M.Eng in Computer Science. Brad's entire Microsoft career has been focused on empowering developers. Brad spent his first three years at Microsoft working as a Program Manager in the Windows division managing ISV programs. For the past year and a half, Brad has been working on the Visual Studio Debugger as a program manager.

Oleg Sych (Senior Lead Consultant, Catapult Systems)
Oleg Sych a Senior Lead Consultant for Catapult Systems. He has been working as a professional software engineer since 1993, building distributed enterprise applications since 2000 and working with .NET technologies since 2002. Oleg holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science, MCSD and MCPD Enterprise certifications. His professional interests include framework design and enterprise application architecture. In his spare time, Oleg writes and speaks about code generation. Check out his blog at https://www.olegsych.com for in-depth coverage of Text Templates in Visual Studio.

Quan To (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
Quan To graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Quan is a Program Manager and has been at Microsoft for ten years. He has spent time working on Microsoft Learning Technologies, Tablet PC, Visual Studio Deployment and transferred to the Visual Studio Ecosystem team two years ago.Quan's 3.5 years on the Visual Studio Deployment team has helped him understand the complications of deploying large and small scale applications and has become one of the deployment leaders in the division.