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.  

Alexander Lozhechkin leads Developer Experience and Evangelism (DX) business at Microsoft Central & Eastern Europe region covering 10 subsidiaries and 33 countries. DX team is responsible for App Ecosystem development across Windows, Windows Phone, Microsoft Azure and Windows Server technologies; as well as broad technical audience connection (including developers, IT Professionals, Students, Startups, ISVs) as well as for Visual Studio and MSDN marketing and sales. Alexander is a member of Microsoft Central & Eastern Europe Leadership Team. Alexander had previously been Director of Developers & Platform Evangelism business at Microsoft Russia. Before joining Microsoft in 2004, he was leading a software development of DocsVision document management system. Alexander is passionate about the opportunities for individuals and organizations that building software on the Microsoft platform presents. Many of DX team activities are to stimulate local software economies in both emerging and developed countries in our region.  

Mads Kristensen is a Sr. Program Manager on the Web Platforms & Tools team at Microsoft working on the web developer experiences of Visual Studio. He has over a decade of experience in developing web applications on the Microsoft platform which got him the honor of becoming both an ASP.NET MVP and ASPInsider. Mads is also the creator of BlogEngine.NET, Web Developer Checklist, SchemaStore.org and Web Essentials, Image Optimizer and Voice Commands for Visual Studio.  

Brady Gaster is a Program Manager on the Azure SDK and Web Tools Extensions teams at Microsoft. He helps create tools and SDKs to make it easier for developers to party in the cloud, like Azure Tools in the Web Tools Extensions for Visual Studio, the Azure Management Libraries for .NET, and the Azure Management Libraries for Java. He likes to talk about his favorite technologies - Azure, ASP.NET, Web API, SignalR in sessions and on his blog, www.bradygaster.com. You can find Brady on Twitter at @bradygaster when he's not tinkering with the ASP.NET stack, Azure, devices running the .NET Micro Framework, or making music in his basement.