Speakers Biographies
Marcia Akins
Marcia
is an independent consultant and software developer who for the past few
years has worked primarily with Visual FoxPro. She is a Microsoft Most
Valuable Professional and also has Microsoft Certified Professional
qualifications for both Distributed and Desktop Applications in Visual
FoxPro. She has written articles for both FoxPro Advisor and FoxTalk
Magazine and co-authored the books 1001 Things You Wanted to Know About VFP
and MegaFox: 1002 Things You Wanted to Know About Extending VFP with Andy
and Rick Schummer (Hentzenwerke Publishing). She has been co-author of the
Kitbox column in FoxTalk with Andy Kramek since December, 2001. Speaking
en-gagements include SouthwestFox (Tempe, 2004, 2005), Praha Devcon (Prague,
Czech Republic,2002, 2005), EssentialFox (Kansas City, 2002, 2003, 2004),
OzFox (Sydney, Australia, 2003), Conference to the Max (Holland, 2000,
2002), Great Lakes Great Database Workshop (Milwaukee, 2000, 2001, 2003,
2003), Advisor DevCon (2001, 2002), European DevCon in Frankfurt, as well as
user group meetings in Europe and the U.S.
Craig Berntson
Craig
has been developing custom and packaged software since 1984 and has
worked with every ver-sion of Fox, beginning with FoxBase. Currently he
uses Visual FoxPro 8 and 9, Microsoft SQL Server, and C++ to develop
medical coding and database software for 3M Health Information Systems
in Salt Lake City. He has authored articles for FoxTalk and the VFUG
Newsletter and wrote the book CrysDev: A Developer’s Guide to
Integrating Crystal Reports, available from Hentzenwerke Publish-ing.
Craig has spoken at Advisor DevCon, Great Lakes Great Database Workshop,
Southwest Fox, Essential Fox, DevTeach, FoxCon, several Microsoft events,
and user groups around the country. He is the President of the Salt Lake
City Fox User group, where he is also a frequent speaker, a Microsoft
Certified Solution Developer, and has been a Microsoft Visual FoxPro MVP
since 1997. You can con-tact him at craig@craigberntson.com or read his
blog, FoxBlog, at www.craigberntson.com
Yair Alan Griver
Yair
Alan Griver is the architect for the Microsoft.com community properties.
As architect, he is re-sponsible for creating a coherent underlying
platform for properties that include blogs.msdn.com, forums.msdn.com,
GotDotNet, chats and CodePlex. In addition to MSCOM architect, Alan is
also re-sponsible for the continued development of Visual FoxPro. Prior
to the architect role, Alan was Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data
group. As Group Manager, Alan’s teams produced the tools used inside of
Visual Studio .NET, Office and SQL Server that surface data capabilities,
as well as Visual FoxPro. Prior to this position, Alan was a Lead
Program Manager and Community Evangelist for Visual Basic .NET, driving
community interests into Visual Basic .NET. Before joining Microsoft,
Alan was Chief Information Officer at GoAmerica, a publicly traded
telecommunications (wireless internet) company, and co-founder and CIO
of Flash Creative Management a business strategy and technology
consulting company. Alan is the author of five books on Visual FoxPro
and Visual Basic, the creator of various development frameworks, and has
developed database systems ranging into the thousands of users. He has
spoken around the world on databases, object orientation and development
team management issues, as well as XML and messaging-based applications.
Doug Hennig
Doug
Hennig is a partner with Stonefield Software Inc. He is the author of
the award-winning Stone-field Database Toolkit (SDT), the award-winning
Stonefield Query, and the MemberData Editor, Anchor Editor, New
Property/Method Dialog, and CursorAdapter and DataEnvironment builders
that come with Microsoft Visual FoxPro. Doug is co-author of the "What's
New in Visual FoxPro" series and "The Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro
7.0". He was the technical editor of "The Hacker's Guide to Visual
FoxPro 6.0" and "The Fundamentals." All of these books are from
Hentzenwerke Publishing. Doug formerly wrote the monthly "Reusable
Tools" column in FoxTalk, with over 100 articles published in over 10
years. He has spoken at every Microsoft FoxPro Developers Conference (DevCon)
since 1997 and at user groups and developer conferences all over the
world. He has been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since
1996. He is also one of the administrators of the VFPX community
initiative (http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View/aspx?ProjectName=VFPX),
and is project manager of several VFPX projects. Web:
www.stonefield.com
and www.stonefieldquery.com, Email: dhennig@stonefield.com, Blog:
http://doughennig.blogspot.com
Venelina Jordanova
Venelina
has been FoxPro developer since version 2.0. She is specialized in database
development and designing application architecture. She is principal of
JEI located in Varna Bulgaria. The company is Microsoft Certified Partner
and operates as outsourcing center providing VFP and .NET solutions. She
can be reached at venelina@mnet.bg.
Andy Kramek
Andy Kramek is an independent consultant and long-standing FoxPro
developer. After many years working in England and Europe Andy moved to
Akron, Ohio at the beginning of 2001. He and his wife, Marcia Akins, are
joint owners of Tightline Computers Inc and they have, for many years,
spe-cialized in the development of customized data-centric software. As well
as having been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional every year since 1998
he is also a Microsoft Certified Professional for Visual FoxPro in both
Desktop and Distributed applications.
In addition to helping write white papers on Visual FoxPro for Microsoft, he
was co-author of the "Kitbox" column in FoxTalk Magazine, between April 1998
and July 2006 and has 98 articles in that series to his credit. In July
2006, he and Marcia transferred their column to FoxPro Advisor and have
continued writing in their unique style every month. Book credits include "The
Revolutionary Guide to Visual FoxPro OOP", Wrox Press, 1996 and, together
with Marcia Akins and Rick Schummer, he co-wrote the very successful "1001
Things You Wanted to Know About VFP", Hentzenwerke Publishing, 2000 and
“MegaFox: 1002 Things you Wanted to know about Extending VFP”, Hentzenwerke
Pub-lishing, 2002.
Beth Massi
Beth
Massi is a Senior Systems Architect at a health care software product
company called GiftRAP Corporation (www.GiftRAPCorp.com). A Microsoft
Solutions Architect MVP, she is currently work-ing on distributed
applications and frameworks using Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, SQL-Server,
and Visual FoxPro. In the past she has worked for the Visual FoxPro team
at Microsoft and has been a consultant for Flash Creative Management.
She has helped build back office infrastructures and front-ends using
.NET, SQL-Server, Visual FoxPro, and other Microsoft technologies. She
has worked on various projects including developing object-oriented
middle-tier frameworks, COM, .NET, Web and Windows-based applications
using Microsoft development tools.
Lisa Slater Nicholls
Lisa Slater Nicholls is an independent software developer. She and Colin
Nicholls provide enterprise data integration and analysis services using
Visual FoxPro and XML in a variety of environments and languages (dba
Spacefold). She has served in project management, design, and Xbase
development roles for Visual FoxPro 9.0's report system features. She served
as an integration engineer for Acxiom Corporation for four years, designing
solutions for Oracle, Siebel, IBM, and other Acxiom Alliance partners.
Lisa has a special interest in the development of peer-to-peer support
mechanisms in the programming community and was one of the original
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. She has taught numerous FoxPro-RAD
seminars and has been a featured speaker at major FoxPro and database
conferences throughout the world. She served as editor and writer for
various FoxPro and database development magazines. She was lead writer for
the bestselling Using FoxPro 2.x volumes (Que) and FoxPro MAChete (Hayden),
the author of the "Report Writer" volume of Pros Talk Fox Series One, and
Series Editor for Pros Talk Fox Series Two (Pinnacle). Her most recent book
is Flying Fox: Applying Visual FoxPro Reporting to Any Data, in Any
Environment (dFPUG c/o ISYS GmbH).
Rick Schummer
Rick Schummer is the president and lead geek at White Light Computing,
Inc., which is headquartered in southeast Michigan, USA. He prides himself
in guiding his customers' Information Technology investment toward success.
He enjoys working with top-notch developers; has a passion for develop-ing
software using best practices, and for surpassing customer expectations, not
just meeting them. After hours he writes developer tools that improve
productivity and occasionally pens articles for FoxTalk, FoxPro Advisor, and
several user group newsletters.
Rick is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (VFP), a Microsoft Certified
Professional, and an administrator of VFPX.
Rick is co-author of What’s New In Nine: Visual FoxPro’s Latest Hits,
Deploying Visual FoxPro So-lutions, MegaFox: 1002 Things You Always Wanted
to Know About Extending Visual FoxPro and the award winning 1001 Things You
Always Wanted to Know About Visual FoxPro (KiloFox), all from Hentzenwerke
Publishing. He is founding member and Secretary of the Detroit Area Fox User
Group (DAFUG) and is a regular presenter for user groups across North
America, and at GLGDW, EssentialFox, Southwest Fox, German DevCon, VFE
DevCon, and Advisor Summit conferences.
You can reach Rick at raschummer@whitelightcomputing.com,
rick@rickschummer.com, and http://www.whitelightcomputing.com