About the Reviewers
Marius Constantinescu is currently the Lead Architect on Microsoft Solutions for a professional IT services company based in Geneva, Switzerland and also has experience on commercial development dating back in the late nineties.
Having worked with .NET from its very early beta stages as well as with SharePoint platform ever since 2003, Marius C. has achieved number of prestigious roll-outs for large international organizations and private companies, providing consulting expertise on architectures based on .NET, SharePoint, and related software.
His passion for technology has made him a recipient of various prestigious awards, such as Technology Scout for 2005, while being Microsoft Solution architect for Siemens, as well as gaining the Siemens Certified Architect certification. Most recently, his focus has again shifted to the latest .NET technologies, such as Silverlight 4, SharePoint 2010, and Cloud Computing.
He has been performing technical reviewing for almost a decade with multiple publishing houses and prestigious authors around .NET technologies, including two best-sellers on ASP.NET 2.0 for the popular author Dino Esposito back in 2005. He also speaks at technology conferences and maintains a blog available at http://nettitude.spaces.live.com.
I'd like to thank my fiancée, Rékà K. for her immense patience and support through the long late nights I had to spend away and all the weekends traded in favor of my other passion — the .NET technology.
Laurent Duveau is an expert in Silverlight, a technology that fascinates him and the development of which he has followed since the very beginning in 2007. He has had the opportunity to give a multitude of Silverlight presentations at conferences such as TechDays, DevTeach, Code Camp, User Group, MSDN Tour, and W3C. Laurent has been a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) since 2004 and is also a Silverlight MVP, Silverlight Partner, and Silverlight Insider. He is Vice-president of RunAtServer Consulting (http://www.runatserver.com/), a company based in Montreal, QC whose focus is Silverlight projects, coaching, and training.
Russell East's career spans over 15 long years in which he has led development teams and developed software for a number of companies in varying industries of various sizes. He has used various technologies and languages along the way. These days he has focused his skill set in application architecture, primarily, Windows development with a mix of web development using WPF, Silverlight, WCF, and ASP.NET MVC using C#. Currently, he is freelancing and building up an innovative software company called Razorbeam.
Vikram Pendse is a consistent Microsoft MVP and first Silverlight MVP in India. He is very passionate about Microsoft Technologies. He completed his Masters in Computer Management from IndSearch, Pune. He is also involved as a speaker in various Microsoft events like Tech Ed-India,Virtual TechDays, DevCon, and other community events like CSI Annual Meets, IT Expo, Architect Day, and so on. He actively works with Pune User Group (http://www.puneusergroup.org) as User Group Lead, which is supported by Microsoft and INETA. Silverlight and ASP.NET are his core areas of interest. In the past, he executed large-scale Web Applications for Healthcare and hospitals, which included Product Development and implementation of HL7 standards. He also created POCs for many banking projects and HealthCare applications using cutting-edge technologies such as Silverlight, WCF RIA, and LINQ. He blogs at http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com.
I am very thankful to my family and friends for supporting me all the time for my work and community activities. Also, I am very thankful to India MVP Program and Team Silverlight at Microsoft for their continuous support and encouragement.
I would like to dedicate this book to my son Kevin and my wife Vanesa