Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference 2008 Speakers
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.
Douglas Hodges (Principal Architect, Microsoft)
Douglas Hodges is the Architect for the Visual Studio IDE. Douglas has worked at Microsoft for over 16 years and has spent most of that time in the Developer Tools Division. Originally he was one of the lead developers on the OLE 2.0 project and is an expert on OLE and COM. Douglas was one of the architects for Visual Interdev 1.0, Visual Interdev 6.0, Visual J++ 6.0, Visual Studio .NET 2002, Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005, and Visual Studio 2008. Throughout his career at Microsoft he has concentrated on the design of extensible, component-based software. These efforts have lead to the creation of the extensible Visual Studio development environment and the open, 3rd party Visual Studio Integration Program (VSIP). Prior to Microsoft, Douglas worked on CAD/CAM software and as a consultant specializing in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. Douglas has a ME from Carnegie Mellon and a BSE from the University of Pennsylvania.
Paramesh Vaidyanathan (Principal Product Unit Manager, Microsoft)
Paramesh Vaidyanathan is the Product Unit Manager of the Visual Studio Platform, Ecosystem and Non-Pro Tools team. He started at Microsoft in July 1989 as a software design engineer working on desktop and network performance of operating systems, an area he is still passionate about today. He eventually became the Test Manager for Active Directory and Security on the Windows 2000 project, till that product shipped in December 1999. Paramesh became Product Unit Manger of the team responsible for migrating Fortune 100 companies to Microsoft server technologies. In the summer of 2001, he moved back to India at Microsoft’s India Development Center to head up an incubation project that culminated in the Windows Systems Resource Manager that now ships as part of Windows Server. He then took over and built up the Developer Tools Group in that center before moving back to Redmond in the summer of 2006. Until recently, he was the Product Unit Manager of the Non-Professional Tools group that is responsible for the VS Express line of products and Microsoft Popfly.
Joe Marini (Director, Microsoft)
Joe Marini has been active in the software development industry for 20 years. Joe joined Microsoft in 2003 as part of the Expression product team, and took over the Development Tools Ecosystem team in 2006. Prior to joining Microsoft, he held prominent roles in creating products such as QuarkXPress, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and mFactory's mTropolis, in each case specifically focusing on developing the extensibility architectures for those products. He is a regularly featured speaker at industry conferences and has authored or co-authored several books on software and Web development. His book The Document Object Model is widely regarded as the definitive resource for working with the DOM.
Tim Wagner (Principal Development Lead, Microsoft)
Dr. Wagner is the former lead of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform project, and now works with Microsoft's Visual Studio Platform team on the evolution of its Visual Studio products. Dr. Wagner's background in IDEs, including both research and product development, has included a wide variety of patents, papers, and operational contributions. With extensive experience in the Eclipse open source community, companies such as BEA that leverage and extend open source across their product offerings, and with Microsoft and other companies producing commercial IDEs, Dr. Wagner has garnered a wealth of insight into the similarities and differences in the business, technology, and product models.
James Lau (Lead Program Manager, Microsoft)
Before joining the Ecosystem team, James was part of the Visual Studio IDE team where he designed and worked on a number of IDE features. He is now part of the Visual Studio Ecosystem team, and his team builds the Visual Studio SDK, and helps VSIP customers and Visual Studio extenders in the community build great extensions for Visual Studio. Prior to joining Microsoft, James has worked as a developer in a number of other high-tech companies such as Amazon.com, Research In Motion, and Cisco Systems. James holds a Bachelor of Applied Sciences in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a Master in Engineering Management from Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College.
Gareth Jones (Senior Software Developer, Microsoft)
Gareth Jones is a development architect in the Visual Studio extensibility Ecosystem group at Microsoft. For the last five years he's been working on DSL Tools and software factories and now he’s broadening those techniques to help make extending Visual Studio with any of your own tools a much easier, more accessible proposition. He co-authored the book Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools with other members of the DSL Tools team.
Previously at Microsoft he has been a development manager for bespoke enterprise solutions, led the development of Microsoft's bCentral UK business portal and managed a consultancy team focused on ISVs. Before joining Microsoft, Gareth led developments in the intelligence analysis, simulation and aerospace industries.
Aaron Marten (Software Developer, Microsoft)
Aaron Marten is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft in the Visual Studio Ecosystem group. He has been working in various capacities on the Visual Studio SDK and Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) since 2003. He presents regularly on various VSX topics at Microsoft’s VSIP conferences and has presented at industry conferences such as Lang.NET, TechEd, and DevTeach. His blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronmar/) covers the finer points of adding custom extensions to Visual Studio. Aaron received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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 (http://www.dslfactory.org). 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.
Stephen Walther (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)
Stephen Walther works with the ASP.NET MVC team and the ASP.NET MVC community to develop content around ASP.NET MVC. He is the author of the forthcoming book ASP.NET MVC Unleashed. He also is the author of the best-selling ASP.NET book, ASP.NET Unleashed. He has spoken at numerous conferences including TechEd, ASP.NET Connections, and Microsoft DevDays. Read his blog on ASP.NET MVC at http://StephenWalther.com.
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.
Pablo Galiano (VSX Insider, Clarius Consulting)
Pablo Galiano is an associate of Clarius Consulting, providing training, consulting and development in Microsoft .NET technologies.
He is a C# MVP and has been involved in the Software Factories spaces since the beginning, at P&P with the first version of Web Services Software Factory. Pablo's areas of expertise are: Software Factories, GAX, VSX, DSL, Code Generation, and C#.
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 http://www.olegsych.com for in-depth coverage of Text Templates in Visual Studio.