Meet Our Instructors

Rachel is a 20+ year consultant, author, mentor, and former Microsoft employee in the IT industry who speaks at top industry conferences such as VSLive!, DevConnections, MIX, and more. During her career, Rachel has worked on projects of all sizes from the smallest of apps to the largest enterprise systems at some of the world’s leading companies. ...

Dave Baskin is a Senior Consultant at Wintellect with a broad range of experience in building robust, large-scale Web applications and business components.

Sathyaish Chakravarthy is a freelance software developer, teacher, and aspiring actor living in India. He has been writing code and teaching about programming since 1997.

Joel Cochran is a user-experience engineer, Web developer, and Lead Developer for WintellectNOW, an on-demand video training service. A Microsoft Windows Platform Development MVP and ASPInsider, Joel focuses on ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript, and Windows Azure. He spends an inordinate amount of time on Twitter (@joelcochran) and far less time on his blog.

Jim is an independent software consultant specializing in .NET, Java, and AngularJS. He is a regular contributor to the .NET port of ApprovalTests and the creator of the Perl port. He recently received an MS in Computer Science from CSUSM, in part for his research on teaching computational thinking using interactive games. He puts this experience to work as he writes courseware for teachingkidsprogramming.org, a non-profit dedicated to creating courseware for middle school students.  His blog is at ihadthisideaonce.com.

Bruce Dawson has been obsessed with computer performance for years. Bruce worked at various game companies and at Microsoft (Xbox and the Windows Performance group) before ending up at Valve working on games. In all of these jobs there has been a focus on making things faster (and also less crashy). Bruce finds a particular joy in identifying performance bugs in other people’s software, and then sharing the analysis on his blog. His blog covers ETW tracing, Visual Studio, floating-point math, high-speed unicycling, and the best way to make a gin and tonic. ...

Kathleen Dollard wants to teach you to code better. A long-time Microsoft MVP, she's passionate about coding and equally passionate about the tools we use to write code. Kathleen has written dozens of articles and spoken at conferences and user groups around the world, and is constantly pushing Microsoft to make their world-class compilers and tools even better. She is the Director of Engineering for Real in Denver. She’s excited to be sharing new features of C# 6, Visual Basic 14, and the next version of Visual Studio with a WintellectNOW audience.

Mark has over 25 years of experience in the disciplines of software engineering, database administration, and project management. Software that Mark developed for the radio industry is still in use today. He was a lead developer on the team that created Tapscan, a well-known Arbritron ratings analysis package that has dominated that industry for many years.

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G. Andrew Duthie, aka devhammer, is the founder and chief consultant for Devhammer Enterprises. Andrew is a software developer, trainer, writer, and consultant with more than 15 years of industry experience, including nearly 10 years as a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft's Mid-Atlantic States district, where he provided support and education for developers working with the Microsoft development platform. In addition to his work with Microsoft, Andrew is the author of several books on ASP.NET and Web development, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences from VSLive! and ASP.NET Connections to Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) and Tech-Ed. Andrew has been participating in the user group community since way back in 1997, when one of his co-workers dragged him out to the Internet Developers User Group in Tyson's Corner, VA, and he's been hooked ever since. ...

Ike Ellis is a partner at Crafting Bytes, a San Diego software studio and Data Engineering consultancy. He has been a Microsoft Data Platform MVP since 2011. He coauthored the book "Developing Azure Solutions," now in its second edition. He is a popular speaker at SQLBits, PASS Summit, and SQL in the City. He speaks at user groups, code camps, and SQL Saturdays. And he has written courses on SQL Server, Power BI, SSRS, SSIS, and SSRS for Wintellect.

Todd Fine is CEO of Wintellect. His responsibilities encompass all aspects of day-to-day operations, including revenue and profitability, management of business processes, quality of delivered services, client relationships, and maintaining Wintellect's culture of excellence. ...

Bret has been a Windows sysadmin for decades, and holds nearly 30 Microsoft certifications. He’s worked all over, including the U.S. Navy, in the federal and local government, and as a contractor, and now as a freelance consultant and cofounder of Winsitter.com, where he’s building the next-gen monitoring solution for Windows Server. You can email him at bret@fishbrains.com.

Dave Franklyn, MCT, MCSE, MCITP, Microsoft MVP Windows Expert-IT Pro, is a Senior Information Technology Trainer and Consultant at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama. He is also an East USA Microsoft Regional Lead MCT. Dave’s been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for three years and has been teaching at Auburn University for 16 years. He’s been working with computers since 1976, starting out in the mainframe world and moving early into the networking arena. Before joining Auburn, he spent 22 years in the U.S. Air Force as an electronic communications and computer systems specialist, retiring in 1998. He is president of the Montgomery Windows IT Professional Group.

Jeff Fritz is a long-time web developer and survivor of the .COM era. He has built large Software-as-a-Service applications in every version of ASP.NET with a focus on performance and scalability. He is a program manager on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft and a former evangelist for Telerik. You can find him speaking at large Microsoft developer conferences and regional developer events in the mid-Atlantic.

Russ Fustino is a Xamarin Developer Evangelist and CEO of Fustino Brothers, Inc (FBI), an app-building company. FBI Tull apps are endorsed by Jethro Tull. Russ is a highly experienced software developer evangelist, and is a Windows and Windows Phone app developer who has published many apps. He has a passion for software development and development tools that he conveys through live seminars, webcasts, blogs, photos, and Internet video productions. Russ is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Windows Platform Development and was awarded INETA's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 for helping educate, entertain, and enlighten more than one million programmers. Russ heads up an INETA Tampa Windows Phone user group. Check out his new blog at www.russtoolshed.net/blog and follow @FustinoBrothers and @RussFustino.

John is a Senior Consultant at Wintellect and is the author of the book Windows Store Applications Succinctly. Prior to consulting, he spent much of his career working on high-performance video and statistical analysis tools for premier sports teams, with an emphasis on the NFL, the NBA, and Division 1 NCAA Football and Basketball. His consulting clients range from small to Fortune-500 companies and his work has been featured at Microsoft conference keynotes and sessions. ...

Eric Greene has been a professional software developer for 23 years, specializing in web development. He has built software ranging from search engines to content management systems to financial analysis tools. He trains developers who work for Fortune 500 companies, major charities, and other organizations worldwide. Eric specializes in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, C#, HTML/CSS, React, Angular, Vue, Redux, Apollo/GraphQL, Node.js, .NET Core, Blazor, and much more.

Kevin Griffin has been working as a professional developer since 2006, where his first job was working on components for the Symantec security suites. Kevin is the owner of Griffin Consulting, Inc, CTO of Winsitter, and is always looking for new challenges. As a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and ASPInsider, Kevin spends a lot of time teaching and mentoring developers to tackle new technologies and expand their skill sets. In 2008, Kevin started the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group. He serves as the Director of Membership for INETA. You can find Kevin speaking at conferences, code camps, and user groups across the country.

Paul Hacker has more than 15 years of experience in application architecture, design, development, and management with the Microsoft stack. His areas of expertise include ALM, Process Improvement, and Team Foundation Server.  Having distinguished himself as a leader in the IT industry, he has been awarded the distinction of Microsoft MVP in the ALM category every year since 2006. Paul has proven his expertise in Application Lifecycle Management and has demonstrated his professionalism and commitment to the continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development, and maintenance.

As an electrical engineer, Mitch Harpur started his career doing military control system software and simulators for the South African Defense Force. This work led him to the world of distributed system software on several platforms, and became immersed, for good or for worse, in the several different approaches and technologies that were gaining traction in the mid to late 90’s. From this strange mix emerged an interest and passion for excellence on the Microsoft stack of technologies, especially those with a Web focus. ...

Kevin Hazzard is a Principal Consultant and Trainer for Developer Journey, LLC living in Richmond, Virginia USA. He is a long-time Microsoft MVP who thrives in diverse, complex computing environments. He is a lifelong student of programming languages and the "pure web" who loves to exchange ideas with others by speaking at many conferences each year and organizing conferences and user groups in his own community. Kevin authored the book Metaprogramming in .NET, which concerns the value of adaptable software design. He and his wife Donna are parents to five lovely children. In his spare time, Kevin serves as an elected member of the School Board in his community, striving every day to improve the lives of students and teachers in public education.

Tim Huckaby is focused on Engaging User Experiences, User Interaction Design, and the Natural User Interface (NUI) as applied with software in systems of all industries. Mr. Huckaby’s expertise encompasses NUI as Touch, Gesture, Voice, and Neural interfaces as applied by a number of compelling software technologies on many software and hardware platforms on a broad spectrum of devices. ...

Kevin has been a software developer for more years than he cares to remember. Starting out as a PL/1 programmer before moving onto C, C++, Assembler and more recently Java, JavaScript, and C#. He has developed applications for large banks and small start-ups. He has a passion for teaching, having worked as an instructor for almost 25 years delivering training all over the world. Kevin is one of the founders of Rock Solid Knowledge, a software development and consultancy business based in the United Kingdom.

Frank La Vigne leads the Data and Analytics practice at Wintellect, where he helps customers leverage data science in order to create smarter solutions and happier customers. He blogs regularly at FranksWorld.com and has a podcast called Data Driven devoted to all things Data Science. Frank has extensive experience as a software engineer. You can find him on Twitter at @tableteer.

Josh Lane is a Senior Consultant and Architect for Wintellect in Atlanta. He’s spent 16 years architecting, designing, and building software on Microsoft platforms. He has successfully delivered a wide range of technology solutions, from call-center websites to custom JavaScript compilers and many others in between. He enjoys the challenge of deriving meaningful business value through software.

After serving as a nuclear-qualified electrician for six years in the United States Navy, Brian earned a Computer Science degree from Penn State University. While attending university, Brian developed C applications for UNIX and DOS. He then moved on to Microsoft Windows and Web applications. After a brief stint dabbling in Java, he moved to .NET as his development stack of choice. ...

Jeremy is the director of application development and principal architect at iVision, a technology services company that leverages data center, converged infrastructure, engineering support services, delivery assurance, and application development practices to engineer the future for clients, today. Jeremy wrote his first program in 1982, was recognized in the "who's who in Quake" list for programming the first implementation of "Midnight Capture the Flag" in Quake C and has been developing enterprise applications for 20 years. For the past 15 years he has specialized in web-based delivery of line of business applications. ...

Sergio is a Senior Consultant at Wintellect with over 20 years of experience in technology services. Before coming to Wintellect, Sergio’s career in IT took him from the shipping industry to the financial firms of Wall Street. Sergio’s focus lately has been in Windows Store app development and UX design.

Richard is a Senior Field Engineer at Microsoft in the UK, where he spends his time heping some of the world's largest companies get the best from Microsoft's developer tools and technologies. He specialises in Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF and Silverlight, with a bit of PowerShell thrown in for good measure.

Tom Marshall built his first computer as a teenager in the late 1970s to control exposure on his photographic enlarger. He’s been obsessed with technology and photography ever since. Marshall has spent his life working with imaging technologies and specializes in building software solutions for imaging workflows. He especially enjoys working on low-level projects and has designed and built the interface and drivers for many printers, scanners, and cameras. Having spent several years teaching photography and mathematics, he loves to share his experience with others.

For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group, one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the International .NET Association (INETA). He also works for Wintellect as a Senior Consultant and Trainer. ...

Margaret began working as a professional technical trainer in 1998. Combining years of prior experience in the technical, marketing, and training arenas, she began teaching web design-related courses for Auburn Montgomery’s Advanced Training Group and other clients such as the National Criminal Justice Association.  Since then, she has regularly led formal training classes for Auburn Montgomery teaching Internet-related technologies and graphic art and design courses. ...

Colin Melia is known as an architect, entrepreneur, trainer, speaker and author with deep and broad knowledge of the latest Microsoft technologies, proven problem solving skills, hands-on solution creation ingenuity and the ability to communicate rich and complex ideas at both the developer and board level. He also has the role of Microsoft Regional Director and has received the Microsoft MVP award for several years. ...

Ken is a cross-platform cloud architect and recovering polyglot programmer with more than 20 years of experience developing code in C, C#, Java, .NET, and PHP. He is a member of the Microsoft Azure Advisors and a Microsoft ALM | DevOps Ranger. As the DevOps Practice Lead at Wintellect, Ken is helping companies of all sizes to master DevOps and develop sustainable cloud-scale architectures.

John Petersen has been developing software for over 20 years. It all started when, as a staff accountant, he was asked to get involved in a system upgrade to replace an old IBM Series 1 computer (about the size of a large refrigerator!). Those first programs were written in Clipper in the summer of 1987. Since that time, tools he has used include dBase, FoxBase, Visual FoxPro, and Visual Basic. ...

Scott J. Peterson has been developing Microsoft Enterprise solutions for organizations around the world for the last 29 years, and is the Chief Solution Architect & Developer behind Liquid Daffodil, a leading creator of corporate and consumer apps for multiple platforms. Scott specializes in large-scale Microsoft stack development and service integration. As a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, Microsoft Certified Trainer, author, and presenter, his topics extended across a broad spectrum, including the Universal Windows Platform, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Xamarin Forms, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Power BI.

Charles Petzold has been writing about Windows programming for over a quarter century, and his most recent book, Programming Windows, 6th Edition (Microsoft Press, 2012) takes on Windows 8. He is currently writing the DirectX Factor column for MSDN Magazine. ...

Ilya Pogrebensky is a senior software consultant, architect, and instructor at CodeValue, an Israel-based software company that delivers a full spectrum of software services enabling customers to focus on their core business activities. He has more than 13 years of experience coding and managing development teams, and has consulted for numerous large companies in Israel's tech and business sectors. Ilya is an expert in information security and secure coding and enjoys sharing his knowledge by writing and teaching.

Jeff Prosise is a co-founder of Wintellect who makes his living writing software and helping others do the same. He has written nine books and hundreds of magazine articles, trained thousands of developers at Microsoft, and spoken at some of the world’s largest software conferences. Jeff’s passion is teaching software developers how to build cloud-based apps with Microsoft Azure and introducing them to the wonders of AI and Machine Learning. In his spare time, Jeff builds and flies large radio-control jets and travels to development shops, universities, and research institutions around the world educating them about Azure and AI.

Jeffrey Richter is a co-founder of Wintellect and the author of several best-selling .NET Framework and Win32 programming books including CLR via C#, 4th Edition, Windows via C/C++, 5th Edition, Programming Server-Side Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000, and Windows 95: A Developer’s Guide. Jeffrey has also been a contributing editor to MSDN Magazine where he authored many feature articles and columns. Jeff has consulted with Microsoft's .NET Framework and Windows teams for many years. ...

Walt has trained thousands of corporate developers since 1998. His teaching schedule takes him throughout the world providing developer training at corporations, universities and software conferences. He writes for Code Magazine and collaborates on books and videos produced for the developer market including his latest book entitled HLSL and Pixel Shaders for XAML Developers from O'Reilly Media (2012). ...

John Robbins is a cofounder of Wintellect, where he heads up the consulting and debugging services side of the business. He also travels the world teaching his Mastering .NET Debugging and Mastering Windows Debugging courses so that developers everywhere can learn the techniques he uses to solve the nastiest software problems known to man. As one of the world's recognized authorities on debugging, John takes an evil delight in finding and fixing impossible bugs in other people's programs. ...

Bill Sempf is a software security architect. His breadth of experience includes business and technical analysis, software design, development, testing, server management and maintenance, and security. In his 20 years of professional experience he has participated in the creation of well over 300 applications for large and small companies, managed the software infrastructure of two Internet service providers, coded complex software happily in every environment imaginable, tested the security of all natures of applications and APs, and made mainframes talk to cell phones. He is the author of C# 5 All in One for Dummies and Windows 8 Programming with HTML5 For Dummies; a coauthor of Effective Visual Studio.NET and many other books, a frequent contributor to industry magazines; and has recently been an invited speaker for the ACM and IEEE, BlackHat, CodeMash, DerbyCon, BSides, DevEssentials, the International XML Web Services Expo and the Association of Information Technology Professionals. Bill also serves on the board of the Columbus branch of the Open Web Application Security Project, and is the Administrative Director of Locksport International.

Mark has been involved with software development for over 20 years, starting on mainframes (IBM VM/SP) and moving on to OS/2, and finally settling on Windows. He has extensive experience consulting for large companies, providing architectural and debugging help, performance tuning and design advice. He is the author and contributor to several open source projects including a popular TAPI wrapper and MVVM library for XAML applications. ...

Tony Sneed has worked for 20 years as a professional developer on the Microsoft platform and has provided expert technical training on the .NET Framework to hundreds of developers. As a consultant for Wintellect, he designed and developed a high-performance enterprise service bus and a single sign-on solution based on Windows Identity Foundation. He is the author of the popular Simple MVVM Toolkit for WPF, Silverlight, Windows Store and Windows Phone, and Trackable Entities for Entity Framework and ASP.NET Web API. Over the past two years his technical blog has attracted over 300,000 visits from 110 countries. ...

Blaize has been interested in software development since childhood. While in grade school, Blaize was already programming and setting up LANs. Before graduating high school, Blaize had written his first commercial software. It was during high school when Blaize started working his first “real job” as a network administrator. Blaize since this time has been exposed to numerous technologies and has written applications ranging from drivers in Assembler to business applications in 4 GL’s for numerous platforms ranging from portable media players to high-end servers. But Blaize’s specialties include web development and mobile web development with technologies like ASP.NET, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and PhoneGap as well as server side technologies for writing web services and websites such as .NET, WCF, Perl, and pHp. ...

Noel Stieglitz is a passionate senior software consultant and entrepreneur based in Atlanta, GA. He enjoys using emerging technologies and industry best practices to solve various business problems. Since 2002, Noel has been using the Microsoft .NET framework and various open-source technologies to build enterprise level and other mission critical applications. In 2013, Noel joined Wintellect as a Senior Consultant. Prior to Wintellect, he founded and managed Compono Technology Inc., a software development and IT staffing firm. Previous clients of Compono Technology Inc. included Fortune 500 companies as well as many smaller companies. ...

Ron has been working with Microsoft technologies for 25 years. He began his Windows software development career with user interface programming in the Win16 API on Windows 3.1, continued through the Win32 era, working on both user interfaces and operating system services, and then spent five years working with COM. For the past 15 years, he has primarily been working with .NET related technologies.  Since JavaScript UI Frameworks have risen in popularity, Ron has also been working extensively with Javascript, Typescript, HTML5, and Angular. ...

Mark Tabladillo Ph.D. is a data scientist at Microsoft. His career has focused on industry application of advanced analytics, using a variety of analytics tools including SAS, SQL Server Analysis Services, Cortana Intelligence (including Microsoft R Server and Microsoft Machine Learning Services), R, and Python. ...

Bob is the founder of LearnVisualStudio.NET and has been creating screencast tutorials since 2002. A five-time Microsoft MVP, his videos have been viewed millions of times on Visual Studio's Start page, Channel 9, Microsoft Virtual Academy, and elsewhere. Bob is an adjunct instructor for WintellectNOW.

Julian Templeman runs a consulting company based in London. He has over 40 years of experience in software development, has written production code in over 20 languages, and has worked with C++ for over 20 years. A professional consultant, trainer, and writer, Julian has authored programming books and videos for several publishers, including Wrox Press, Microsoft Press, and O'Reilly. In such spare time as he has, he is a keen musician, and can sometimes be found playing acoustic blues guitar in pubs in South London.

Bruno has spent decades as a developer and software architect. He has published numerous applications into the Windows store and is competent across a wide variety of operating systems, programming languages, SDKs, and frameworks. Bruno has a large social and technical footprint across many web properties, having been a columnist for MSDN Magazine. Bruno's core competency is getting companies into the cloud, taking their line of business applications and making them uncompromisingly robust, reliable, scalable, secure, and self-healing. Bruno focuses on leveraging open source and containerization to cloud-enable both ISV and enterprise applications.

Tobin Titus is a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer Engineering team and is responsible for making IE fast. Tobin has been at Microsoft since early 2006, working first on the server side of HTTP with the Internet Information Services team, then moving to the Internet Explorer team in late 2011. Tobin is active in community events such as JavaScript game developer conferences, Code Camps, and other user-driven code-centric events.

Paul Usher is a Microsoft MVP and a Technical Evangelist at DevExpress. DevExpress technologies help software developers build high-performance business solutions, see complex software with greater clarity, increase productivity, and create stunning applications for Windows® and the Web in the shortest possible time. ...

Mike Vincent is a veteran software entrepreneur and solutions architect based in Orange County, California. He provides clients throughout North America with application lifecycle management training, consultation, and Scrum coaching, primarily focusing on Microsoft .NET. He has been in the software business for over 25 years in addition to holding marketing management, project management, and structural engineering positions. Actively involved in the user group community since the early 90s, Mike is a past Vice President and Treasurer of INETA Noram. He is a Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management MVP, Professional Scrum Master, Professional Scrum Product Owner, and Professional Scrum Developer Trainer.

Dr. Zacharias Voulgaris is a data scientist and Cybersecurity consultant with a background in engineering and management. After earning his Ph.D. in Machine Learning, he worked in one of the top technical universities, Georgia Tech, as a researcher. Later on, he shifted to the private sector, eventually getting recruited by Microsoft as a program manager. Currently, he works as a data science and Cybersecurity content creator and consultant. He has authored various books on data science and A.I. and developed a series of scripts on these fields, as well as on cryptography.

Jim is a senior software engineer on the Windows Azure team, focusing on driving cross-team platform quality by building applications. Before that, he worked on the team that owned ASP.NET and Visual Studio. He has been at Microsoft since 2008 and loves building websites both at work and in his spare time.

Joyce Weldon is a Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) Master certified in Access, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Joyce has been an Information Technology Instructor with Auburn University Montgomery's Advanced Training Group for 14 years and has 10 years of previous experience as an IBM mainframe programmer and systems analyst with the State of Alabama and Bush Hog Selma. ...