Joe Stagner, Program Manager on the Microsoft Web Tools and Platform

While his team is based in Redmond WA, he lives in New England (USA) with his beautiful wife and children and works wherever the job takes him. He joined Microsoft in 2001 after starting, building, and selling a .COM firm in New York City. He began as a strategic advisor to independent software venders (ISV), moved to a position as a Developer Technology Expert and Technical Evangelist, and after three years, he moved to the Web Tools and Platform Team.

Joe's job at Microsoft has many parts. To communicate with Microsoft's Web Development Customers, to know as much as he can about all web development technologies, those made by Microsoft and those made by everyone else, and to communicate from the world to the Web development product teams and from the web development product teams to the development community.

Steve Andrews, Software Engineer at RDA Corporation

Steve Andrews is a Software Engineer and Architectural Guidance Team member at RDA Corporation with over 8 years of experience implementing custom Microsoft solutions in the Financial, Medical, Manufacturing and Retail industries. Lately, Steve has been focusing on architecture, process, and the Team System platform. Steve is also an MCP, ICSOO, Speaker Liaison for the Philly .NET User Group, and all around .NET fanatic. You can visit his blog at www.dotneticated.com.

Steve Barrows, Territory Manger at Cisco Systems

Steve has been living and working in Northeastern Pennsylvania for over 15-years. Steve's primary responsibility is to help area businesses with their communication strategy and deployment of cost effective solutions. This often requires Steve to act as an "interpreter" between the business decision makers and technical decision makers. "We are in a new communication age. We need access to information quickly, reliably and securely. It all starts with a stable, secure, and resilient network. A Cisco network allows business to run their voice, data and video applications on a single platform. This helps control costs and gain a completive edge."

When Steve is not working he can usually be found at one of his 3-children's sporting events or enjoying the great outdoors that Northeastern Pennsylvania has to offer. Steve lives in the Abington's with his wife Laurie and three children, Blake, Brett and Brittany.

Miguel Castro, Principal Consultant and Trainer at SteelBlue Solutions

Miguel Castro is a principal consultant and trainer with SteelBlue Solutions and specializes in building and teaching how to build, .NET solutions. He is a Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker, ASP Insider, Conference Speaker, and contributor to CoDe Magazine; as well as an active blogger, and has been a software developer for over 20 years. Miguel has spoken at numerous user groups, code camps, and conferences around the world. He has also been featured on the Internet Radio Talk Shows, .NET Rocks, .NET Rocks-TV, Microsoft’s ARCast (Architecture Podcast), and The Polymorphic Podcast on numerous ocassions. His blog and other things of potential interest can be found at http://www.steelbluesolutions.com, where you can also obtain his CodeBreeze code-generator. He currently resides in Lincoln Park, NJ with his wife Elena and his daughter Victoria.

Danilo Diaz, Developer Evangelist for Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey at Microsoft

Danilo Diaz, aka Dani, is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's Mid-Atlantic State district. In this role, he helps developers understand Microsoft's product offerings and strategy. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Perficient Philadelphia where he helped establish their Mobility Practice. Dani has over 8 years of experience in the IT industry. His ability to identify and utilize the right blend of technologies to solve business needs has been an asset on all projects he has worked on. Dani's first .NET project was a Web-based eLearning application which was built on ASP.NET 1.0 Beta 2. As a consultant he has served the roles of system architect, technical lead, developer and mentor on various large and small projects. He has worked on SOA-based applications, Web applications, Windows applications and mobile systems. You can read more about Dani from his blog at http://www.smallandmighty.net.

John Fallon, General Manager of Software as a Service (SAAS) at Solid Cactus

John Fallon is a Solid Cactus original who is in the center of some of the company's most exciting and promising products. "We're developing a suite of products where people can sign up online to have our software manage different processes or aspects of their business," says John. "These products were formerly available only to big companies with huge budgets. Our goal is to make the same kind of state of the art tools available to the average size e-commerce operator. We develop the applications and then turn them over to different teams to manage. We have a product manager for each product."

John is comfortable with every aspect of computers. He was a software developer with CTI from New York. Then he did a hitch at the New Horizons computer learning center where he taught Microsoft programs and applications and received, in his words "a ton of Microsoft certifications."

Perry J. Heliger, Channel Solutions Architect—Convergence at Nortel

Perry holds a BS Degree in Electrical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and a former Air Force Officer. He has over 15 years of experience in LAN/WAN networking, convergence, and communication applications and is a Certified Network Architect. Perry is a frequent speaker at various Nortel Channel Partner events throughout the US.

Ancil McBarnett, Fusion Middleware and SOA Sales Consultant at Oracle

Ancil has been in the IT industry for 13 years, where he initially began his career as an Oracle consultant for a number of foreign companies in the Caribbean and Latin America. Ancil has obtained domain expertise and experience in providing solutions for the Banking & Finance Sector, Public Sector and Criminal Justice & Public Safety domains. Ancil has previously functioned as the chief architect for the Pennsylvania Justice Network (PA JNET), in Harrisburg, PA. Upon joining Oracle, Ancil has helped championed distributed caching strategies in both .Net and Java environments, enabling companies to realize near linear scalability, high availability and extreme performance in today's environment, that demands ever increasing access to data to an ever increasing user population. Ancil has been married for eleven years and when not working, you will find Ancil in various Pennsylvanian parks with his kids or involved with his church reaching inner city kids.

Raymond Steigerwalt, Co-founder of Meezik

Ray Steigerwalt is the co-founder of Meezik, Inc., a social widget development and marketing company. Before starting Meezik, Ray has held top level Software Engineering positions in several large organizations including Software Systems, Inc. and Pepperjam working with large scale, high-demand, distributed applications.

John Weston, TechNet Presenter for Microsoft

Some may call John a geek. He prefers the term "technologist." Truth is, John began working with computer games before PCs even hit the scene – and he’s probably got a dusty prototype stashed somewhere to prove it. He’s a fourth generation educator who loves to help people learn new technologies and relishes that magic moment when the light comes on in their eyes. Before joining Microsoft full time, he spent six years as an MCT, training people at a local college and getting new Microsoft hires up to speed. John holds more certifications than he can remember, but the list definitely includes MCSE, MCDBA, MCT, and CCNA. His favorite technology is SQL and he gets a special thrill from solving customers’ problems. For John, there’s nothing like coaxing people from panic to joy when a server goes down and he can help get the business back up on line. When he’s not working, John can usually be found sailing around Texas with his kids. To find out more about John, visit his blog at http://blogs.technet.com/jweston/.