About the Authors

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 500,000 members worldwide.

Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Bill is an acclaimed author and speaker on ASP.NET and XML Web services. He has authored or coauthored more than 15 books including Professional ASP.NET 3.5, Professional C# 2008, Professional VB 2008, ASP.NET Professional Secrets, XML Web Services for ASP.NET, and Web Services Enhancements: Understanding the WSE for Enterprise Applications (all published by Wiley). 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 an MVP.

Bill is Global Head of Platform Architecture for Lipper (www.lipperweb.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomson 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].

Matt Gibbs is currently the group manager of the .NET Development Platform team in Shanghai. Matt has been working on Microsoft development technologies since joining the IIS 4 team to work on "classic" ASP in 1997. He has coauthored several books on ASP and ASP.NET and enjoys traveling to meet new people and share information on development.

Dan Wahlin (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Connected Systems) is a .NET development instructor and architecture consultant at Interface Technical Training (www.interfacett.com). Dan founded the XML for ASP.NET Developers Web site (www.xmlforasp.net), which focuses on using ASP.NET, Silverlight, AJAX, and XML Web services in Microsoft's .NET platform. He's also on the INETA Speaker's Bureau and speaks at several conferences. Dan has authored/coauthored numerous books over the years on .NET technologies with his latest being Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX and Professional Silverlight 2 for ASP.NET Developers. Dan also writes for several online technical newsletters, blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin, and updates what he's up to from time to time at www.twitter.com/danwahlin. When he's not working with technology, he enjoys sports and writing and recording music to relax a little: http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/tags/Music/default.aspx.

Dave Reed is a developer on the ASP.NET team, and has worked on ASP.NET AJAX since the first beta version in 2006. Before that, Dave was a senior web developer for a banking technology company for four years, and worked on large, highly dynamic ASP.NET Web sites. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science from California State University, Northridge. Dave is a speaker at the occasional Microsoft conference, such as the insiders summit. Dave has always been passionate about programming and considers it a hobby as well as a career. He maintains a popular blog on advanced .NET and ASP.NET topics at http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop, where he enjoys spending time helping the community with general .NET and ASP.NET questions. His most popular article is on ASP.NET ViewState and is typically one of the first Internet search results for the term ViewState. When he is not working, Dave enjoys spending time with his family and his baby girl, Sky. He enjoys gaming in his spare time to relax a little, and can often be found on Xbox Live playing Halo 3 with the gamer tag InfinitiesLoop.