About Our Technical Staff

Michael is an author, an instructor, and the technical curriculum director at DevelopMentor. He is also a co-creator and lead developer for LearningLine, DevelopMentor’s online training platform.

Michael has been building commercial applications with .NET since its initial public beta in 2001. Prior to working with .NET, he spent years working with C++ on Windows and SGI platforms. He holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics from San Diego State University and is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.

Michael has a broad background in software development. He has extensive experience in Windows UI technologies (WPF, Windows Forms, and MFC), web technologies (ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript, and IIS), data technologies (NoSQL, MongoDB, LINQ, Entity Framework, and ADO.NET), and software development process related methodologies (TDD, Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, TFS). In addition to teaching at DevelopMentor, you can find him speaking at conferences and user groups on topics such as NoSQL, MVC, and cloud computing.

Andrew is a full-time Trainer and Software Engineer with DevelopMentor, where he brings thirty years experience as a developer, project leader, trainer, author, and business owner into the classroom. He specializes in the design and development of enterprise solutions with Microsoft development tools, technologies, and platforms.

As a trainer Andrew believes in providing an enjoyable interactive experience for his students. To augment slides and lab exercises, he brings to his classes detailed technology samples and real-world models which he uses during his sessions.

Pinku is a staff instructor and author for DevelopMentor and offers consulting services to help clients implement and validate software architectures and designs. He has authored DevelopMentor's .NET Architecture and Design course.

Pinku is the founder of Celerance, a company offering a software-as-a-service solution for buy-side financial firms that aggregates all their brokerage account information into a single unified portal.

Pinku earned a doctorate in computer science from Northwestern University, concentrating on programming languages and compilers. While in graduate school, Pinku worked with Microsoft Research over several years to assure the .NET platform could support different language paradigms. He developed a Scheme compiler that runs on the .NET platform.

Brock Allen lives in the United States and specializes in web technologies. He has a particular interest in security and applies that perspective to every project he works on. He also enjoys educating others in his field of expertise.

Brock holds three degrees (one of which is in Computer Science) from Tufts University. He has been working in software ever since he was a kid (starting with BASIC on the Atari 800), but started professionally in 1995 with C++ and Win32 on Windows 95. In the unmanaged world he has done development with COM, COM+, MFC and VB6. Once .NET was released he shifted to C# and ASP.NET and has been focusing on the web ever since.

Currently Brock is an independent consultant specializing in .NET, web development, and web-based security with almost 20 years of industry experience. He also is an author and instructor for the premier developer training company DevelopMentor where he manages the web curriculum.

Brock has a broad set of skills in the web sphere from client-side JavaScript, jQuery and HTML5 to intimate server-side knowledge of ASP.NET (including WebForms and MVC). He has a particular interest in web security and focuses on educating others about common vulnerabilities in application development, how to mitigate attacks, and how to implement standard authentication and authorization protocols in web applications.

Richard is an instructor and author at DevelopMentor where he focuses on core .NET and distributed systems. His current technology focus is on WCF, Workflow, BizTalk and Windows Azure. He is the course author of DevelopMentor's "Essential .NET for C# Developers featuring .NET 4" ”What’s New in .NET 4” and co-author of DevelopMentor’s “Windows Workflow 4“ course.

Richard has been working in the software industry for over 20 years starting with mainframes, continuing through the early years of client/server and transitioning to today’s service orientated world. He has spent his professional life working on large distributed systems including a key role as the middle tier architect on the UK national police systems.

He now focuses on technologies that enable developers to build large scale systems on the Microsoft platform. He is a well known conference speaker having spoken at TechEd, DevWeek, Software Architect, BASTA! and Oredev and can often be found helping people on various newsgroups, mailing lists and web forums, including being a moderator of the MSDN WCF Forum - activity that has resulted in Microsoft awarding him MVP status for Connected Systems. When not teaching, Richard is a consultant for Rock Solid Knowledge Ltd and thinktecture.

Mark is a DevelopMentor instructor teaching many areas in .NET. He has been professional software developer for over 18 years and is an expert in C#, .NET, ASP.NET and Silverlight with a background in in 4GL's like Uniface, SQL Windows and Visual Basic.

Mark has been awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for 7 years straight for C# and is a MCTS. He is currently active as a software architect, author, speaker, instructor, and code cruncher.
Current technologies of interest include Silverlight, RIA Services, WCF, LINQ, Entity Framework and Windows Phone 7.

As an Instructor and Consultant for DevelopMentor, Vince uses his 25 years of experience partnering with Fortune 100 companies. As a leader in his industry, Vince promotes state-of-the-art system development and process improvement techniques in the area of Business Analysis. His skills are unparalleled in the areas of requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, documentation, and validation.

Vince has received a Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP) accreditation from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA); a recognition that is held by less than 600 people worldwide. As author of DevelopMentor’s “Developing Requirements using Use Cases” course, Vince specializes in combining training and mentoring techniques to successfully transition organizations from ineffective requirement processes to highly efficient use case practitioners.

Vince also has expertise in Project Management, Object-Oriented (OO) Analysis using the Unified Modeling Language (UML), OO Design, OO Development, and OO Testing. His compelling teaching style, experienced mentoring ability, and diverse business knowledge, has earned him International recognition from both customers and colleagues alike.

Calvin is a part-time Instructor for DevelopMentor. He has been involved in all phases of software design—spending time as a Developer, a Technical Lead, and a Project Lead on several large-scale object-oriented projects. Calvin has been the Technical and the Project Lead on projects for National Pen, Data General Corporation, Delta Airlines, and International Boeki Corporation that have used UML/OMT modeling techniques for analysis/design and a wide-range of technologies including DotNet, Web Services, C++, MFC, MSMQ, COM, and CORBA. Cal’s company, C Squared Consulting, currently employs 10 developers, and is working on projects in California, Oregon, Tennessee, Ireland, and Japan.

Calvin’s teaching experience includes 18 years at Oregon’s highly acclaimed polytechnic—Oregon Institute of Technology where he is currently the Department Chair. In addition to his Full Professor tenured position at OIT, for the past 10 years Calvin has been providing nationwide corporate computer training. He is a Microsoft Certified Instructor and has taught courses in COM, DotNet, C++, the Microsoft Foundation Classes, the Win32 SDK, and JAVA. Clients include Hewlett Packard, Lucent Technologies, Rockwell International, AutoDesk, Data General, Delta Airlines, Unisys, AT&T, Merrill Lynch, and Pitney Bowes.

Andy is an author and instructor for DevelopMentor. He is the author of DevelopMentor's .NET Design Patterns course and teaches various courses including Guerrilla .NET and Essential .NET. Andy's area of specialty is patterns and the chaotic world of multi-threading/parallel programming.
Andy has been working as a Software Engineer since 1993, he has worked with a variety of languages, technologies & operating systems. A large part of his software engineering experience was at Cisco Systems, arriving at Cisco in 1997 as part of an acquisition of a small UK start up. Andy finally left Cisco in 2003, his last role being Lead Architect for Cisco's Identity framework, coordinating an international team of developers.

After leaving Cisco Andy devoted his time and efforts to .NET technology and splits his time between consultancy with Rock Solid Knowledge (http://www.rocksolidknowledge.com) and teaching for Developmentor. You can also find Andy speaking at various UK conferences like Devweek and Software Architecture Week.

Brad is an instructor for DevelopMentor and an independent consultant based in the San Diego, CA area. Brad is a Microsoft MVP for C# with over 10 years of industry experience developing a wide range of desktop and web based applications for many different industries. Brad is a regular speaker at the Southern California Rock and Roll code camp events and both San Diego .NET User groups. Brad is also the co-chairman of the San Diego Tech Immersion Group http://www.sdtig.com Brad loves solving challening problems no matter what the techinical stack and has worked on projects that range from NUI Kinect / Surface applications to MVC Web applications, WPF and Silverlight XAML solutions to NodeJS on Azure cloud solutions.

Rod da Silva is an independent BizTalk consultant with extensive real-world experience architecting, developing and deploying BizTalk solutions and has been involved with some of the largest BizTalk deployments attempted to date.

Rod is a 5 time Microsoft MVP for BizTalk Server and was involved in authoring the current Microsoft certification exam for BizTalk Server. He also started the nearly 3,000 member strong international BizTalk User Group (www.BTUG.biz) in 2005, with chapters all over the world, and continues to head it up and run the Toronto Chapter.

Rod is a course author and instructor for DevelopMentor. His course, "Essential BizTalk Server" has been used to teach 100s of people BizTalk. Rod brings a wealth of BizTalk knowledge and "best practices" to his classes learned from working on dozens of real-world BizTalk engagements for companies of every size as part of his BizTalk consulting practice.

As a part-time instructor for DevelopMentor and part-time independent software engineer at theproblemsolver, Maurice de Beijer specializes in the server side .NET technologies Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation.

Maurice has been building .NET applications as an independent software consultant since its first release in 2001. He joined DevelopMentor as a part-time instructor in 2008 and is the co-author of the “Windows Workflow Foundation 4” course. Maurice has been awarded Microsoft MVP status since 2005,most recently as a Connected Systems Developer.

Maurice has a broad background in software development having developed software for clients ranging from government agencies, financial institutions, trade to storefront point of sale systems. Before he started using .NET, Maurice developed software using different languages like Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic and Delphi. In addition to server side .NET, Maurice uses client side technologies like Windows Forms, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC with jQuery. In his spare time he is a .NET user group leader and a frequent speaker on software development related subjects.

Jason is a developer and consultant currently specializing in .NET, ASP.NET, and Ajax technologies with over 15 years of professional experience. He is Author of of DevelopMentor's Ajax and Javascript courses and co-author of HTML5 and jQuery courses. He is also a co-author for multiple books covering topics from C++ to Java to Python to .NET.

He's been conducting training courses for DevelopMentor for a decade while staying on the leading edge of the emerging technology landscape by consulting for multiple companies both in and out of his home base in sunny San Diego, CA.

Ike is the Lead SQL Instructor and SQL Course Author for DevelopMentor. He is author of DevelopMentor's "Essential SQL Server for Developers" course.

He first worked with Microsoft SQL Server in 1997. Ike started as an independent consultant and trainer in September, 2000. Recent projects include a planning and financial solution used by a major retailer, a SQL Server Analysis Services project for a top ten university, an attorney scorecard tool used by the oldest intellectual property law firm in the US, SQL performance tuning for a medical imaging company, and an enrollment and retention tool used by an online university.

Ike has been Microsoft Certified since the beginning. He currently holds the MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCNE, and MCT certifications. Ike loves consulting, loves technology, and thoroughly enjoys teaching. He’s been doing all three since 1996.

Ike is a popular code camp and user group speaker. In addition to his responsibilities at EllisTeam, he is the current chairperson for the Tech Immersion Group of the San Diego .NET User’s Group. He also volunteers his time with SQLPass and the San Diego .NET Developer’s Group.

Llewellyn is a Senior Agile Consultant for DevelopMentor. He routinely finds himself working with companies undergoing transformations in which they need to improve their employees’ ability to deal with messy, orphaned, and otherwise ugly code.

As a seasoned software developer, Llewellyn specializes in Agile development and has been an Agile Coach for the past 2 years. Focusing on Java and C# he is the creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests which simplifies the testing of complex GUIs, Databases, and objects.

When he’s not working with clients, Llewellyn continues to develop ApprovalTests and regularity speaks at local user groups. Llewellyn is the author of DevelopMentor’s “Test Driven Development for C# Programmers” course.

Kevlin is a trainer, author and consultant for DevelopMentor who focuses on OO design, design patterns, software architecture, Test-Driven Development and Agile processes and practices.

Kevlin is well known for his writing and his conference presentations. He has been a columnist for a number of magazines and sites, including Better Software, The Register, Java Report and C/C++ Users Journal. He is co-author of “A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages”, two volumes in Wiley's Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture.

Kevlin is also the lead and editor for the “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” project, which is an online resource and a book from O'Reilly. You can learn more about Kevlin at curbralan or by following him on Twitter.

Per is an author and instructor for DevelopMentor. He is the author of DevelopMentor’s “Essential SharePoint 2010 for Developers” course. Per’s area of expertise is SharePoint development and architecture.

Per has been working professionally with software development for more than thirty years with a wide variety of languages, technologies and operating systems ranging from mobile phones to mainframes. Since 2006 Per has focused his attention on SharePoint and related technologies, a platform on which he has participated in numerous projects developing both intranet, extranet and internet solutions.
Per is based in Copenhagen, Denmark where he is working as a Senior SharePoint Architect for one of Denmark’s leading SharePoint consultancy companies and Microsoft Country Partner of 2011 ProActive (http://www.proactive.dk).

Per is a regular speaker at the Danish SharePoint User Group.

Kevin is an author and instructor for DevelopMentor. He has authored several of DevelopMentor's Java courses.

Kevin has been involved in software development for 30 years. Starting out at university on DEC 20s and graduating through mainframes and onto all the versions of Windows. Kevin divides his time between teaching, consultancy and getting his hands dirty with real coding in the real world. Kevin's recent roles involve work as a Technical Architect at ICS systems and at Confused.com where he was responsible for the design and implementation of the new public web site driving 1.6 million quotes through the system in the first month of operation.

Kevin's primary areas of expertise are patterns and enterprise architectures in particular web application design and implementation using Model-View-Controller.

Allan is a Senior Agile Consultant for DevelopMentor where he helps companies transition to Agile Software Development by providing training, coaching and consultancy to support Agile and Lean adoption and change.
A noted author and speaker, Allan’s book, Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile was published by John Wiley and Sons in January 2008. Allan is the author of DevelopMentor’s “Agile Development Foundation with SCRUM plus Requirements Management and User Stories”. He is based in London.
Allan holds a BSc degree in Combined Science (Computing) from Leicester University and an MBA at Nottingham University Business School where he was awarded the Best Overall Student prize in his MBA class. Professionally he is a qualified PRINCE 2 Practitioner Project Manager and has completed Product Manager training.

Wallace is a Senior Instructor for DevelopMentor where he is passionate about teaching software development. He enjoys leading students from what they know to what they need to know.

Wallace specializes in the .NET family of technologies. He teaches .NET architecture, performance, and pattern related courses. When not in the classroom, Wallace provides consulting to R&D research groups, both corporate and government, through his company Blue Rock Research. He has worked in the aviation, defense, and financial industries and is an inventor on multiple patents.

Wallace started two successful software-based companies and has full experience with the entire lifecycle of software products – from concept through customer support. Wallace earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.

Brian has been completely submerged in the Java world for almost 8 years. Brian has been a courseware developer of DevelopMentor's Java curriculum since the beginning. He has developed several of our Java courses, and he remains one of our Java technical leads and visionaries. Brian is the author of our "Essential Java" course, and is the original author of DevelopMentor's "Programming Java" course. He is an instructor of DM's Java Web Tier and J2EE courses.

As a part-time instructor for DevelopMentor, Pierre specializes in core .NET, security, graphical user-interface, and new emerging technologies.

Pierre has been writing commercial and internal software for the past 15 years using a variety of languages and platforms.
Pierre has a broad background in software development. He has deep experience in core .net, Windows UI (WPF, Windows Forms, ATL/MFC), Web applicatinos (ASP.NET and Silverlight), web services (WCF, Web services), security and data access (LINQ, ADO.NET). Pierre has authored content for the security, WCF and WPF curriculum at DevelopMentor. Outside DevelopMentor, he is also the author of Clear Office, a set of Office software components for .NET developers.

Bill is a Senior Agile Consultant for DevelopMentor where he is dedicated to the highest-quality delivery of training and consulting. Bill’s pragmatic emphasis on project execution and process improvement has benefited major health-care, human resources, insurance, and financial organizations where he has enabled the transformation of their corporate development processes and development teams of diverse skill-levels.

With over 20 years of experience, Bill has provided unparalleled services in organizational and project assessments, use-case training and modeling, Capability Maturity Model Integration adoption, Unified Process development, Agile Scrum development, service-oriented architecture, application architecture, project mentoring, and technical curriculum development and delivery.

Bill’s accessible and down-to-earth speaking style has brought him to numerous speaking venues where he has provides in-depth talks on use case modeling, agile requirements, and SOA. He is based in Philadelphia.

Scott is an author and instructor for DevelopMentor. His interests range from data access technologies, multithreading, and communications as well as UI technologies including WPF and Silverlight. He is author of DevelopMentor's "Cloud Computing Survey for Developers" course.

Scott's career in software began in 1993 at IBM. Along the way he has developed enterprise solutions for both Microsoft and Cardinal Health. In 2006, Scott founded Brain Hz Software, a company specializing in software architecture and agile development. Scott is a generalist and is experienced in the entire .NET framework.

Scott holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Virginia Tech. He is an active member of the local .NET community, regularly giving talks at user groups and code camps in Southern California.

Robert is an instructor with DevelopMentor where his focus is C++. Students say his teaching style is entertaining, energetic, and enthusiastic.

Robert graduated from Harvard in 1977 cum laude in a double major of computer science and psychology. He designed and implemented compilers for several programming languages for the next 15 years, at Apollo Computer, CenterLine Software (formerly Saber Software), Compass, Object Design, Prime Computer, and Solution Systems.

He specialized in designing non-procedural languages in which one could express knowledge about how to solve a problem, accompanied by generator tools that used the knowledge to actually solve the problem. He is most proud of his code-generator-generator system, where the language expressed patterns that mapped intermediate language tree shapes into sequences of machine instructions, and the tool used that knowledge to generate optimal code in linear time.

George Shepherd has been programming Windows since the 2.0 days back in the late '80s. When MFC came out in the early 1990s, George co-authored the definitive reference for MFC, MFC Internals (1996 Addison-Wesley). During MFC's heyday as a powerful user interface development platform, "MFC Internals" was part of the canon for serious MFC developers.

As a contributing editor for MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal, George covered Web-based and Windows-based development with C++, MFC, and C Sharp and .NET. He is also a co-author of Applied .NET (2001 Addison-Wesley) and Programming Visual C++ .NET (2002 Microsoft Press), and ASP.NET Version 3.5 Step by Step. He's also a big fan of WPF and WCF. When not writing about .NET, delivering seminars with DevelopMentor, or speaking at conferences, he works with Syncfusion to produce the best .NET tools around.

David is a consultant in Computer Science, specializing in software systems and programming, and a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He obtained an M.S. degree in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a B. S. Degree in Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, where he graduated with honors.

As a part-time instructor and author for DevelopMentor, Mark specializes in core .NET, graphical user-interface (GUI), and new emerging technologies. Mark has been involved with software development for the past 20 years, on everything from mainframes (IBM VM/SP) to PCs (OS/2, Win16/32/64) and in a variety of languages and methodologies. Mark has extensive experience consulting for Fortune 500 companies where he provides architectural, debugging, performance tuning, and design advice.

With all of that, he continually returns to his first love – user-interface design. He is the author of the “Windows Presentation Foundation”, “Surface” and “Expression Blend” curriculum for DevelopMentor and spends a good portion of his time working on .NET related projects involving WPF and Silverlight.

Tony is an instructor and author for DevelopMentor, where he teaches numerous courses on C# and .NET. He has authored two courses: Exploring .NET , which surveys the principal pillars of .NET (EF/LINQ, WCF, WPF/SL , RIA Services, MVVM, MEF), and Entity Framework 4.0 with Data Services, which takes a deep dive into the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship ORM product.

Tony has over 15 years experience in software development, focusing primarily on distributed application architectures. Prior to joining DevelopMentor, he worked as a lead developer and architect for the Walt Disney Company, where he designed enterprise-wide services for application security.

Tony has appeared at Microsoft’s TechEd conference and is a frequent speaker at developer groups throughout the country. He has written articles for various technical publications, including MSDN Magazine, and shares his technical expertise on .NET via his blog and on Facebook.

Dr. Sumida is a part-time instructor with DevelopMentor. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA, where he conducted research on applying neural networks to problems in Artificial Intelligence. His dissertation involved building a neural network-based system for understanding natural language texts.

From 1985 to 1994, Ron was a Teaching Associate at the UCLA Computer Science Department, where he presented weekly lectures on LISP, MS-DOS, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing, and provided students with assistance on programming projects.

Dr. Sumida has been working as an instructor for DevelopMentor since 1994. He currently teaches the courses Essential Win32: system services for developers, Essential COM+ for C++ programmers, and Essential .NET: building applications and components with C#. He is also course author for the Essential Windows Forms course. During his more than 10 years in the training industry, he has taught developers for many Fortune 500 companies and he is actively involved in the recruitment and training of new instructors for DevelopMentor.

Since 1991, Mark has been providing training and mentoring to companies on object-oriented programming and C#, Java, and C++ software development. Much of his work involves helping companies manage the transition to new programming languages and platforms. He is currently focusing on C# and the .NET platform, which he has been exploring full-time since November 2001.

Among his software development projects he has developed a military flight trainer, a cell generator for automatic layout of CMOS transistors, a digital signal processor chip simulator, and an SGML publishing system.

Prior to joining the DevelopMentor training staff, he was an instructor at the University of California, Irvine Extension, where he taught courses in C and C++ programming as well as UNIX.

As a terrific coach, instructor and author for DevelopMentor in the areas of business analysis and project management, Phil Vincent offers a wealth of experience and a passion for excellence. He is an expert in all aspects of the software development lifecycle and “wrote the book” on the Software Development Lifecycle for two organizations.

Phil has been consulting with industry and government, in a wide variety of industries, for about 20 years. He specializes in training and coaching project teams and executives about use cases, object modeling and iterative development. Phil’s innovative approach to managing risk on system development projects has been adopted by several organizations.

For DevelopMentor, Phil is the author of the “Foundations of Business Analysis” course. He is a great facilitator and enjoys leading “kickstart” workshops, working closely with the team to develop initial use cases, object models, process models and project plans, and helping to establish an effective project rhythm. Phil earned a MSc in Computer Science, and is a Certified ScrumMaster and an IBM Rational Unified Process Certified Solution Designer.

Dave has been working in the software industry since 1992. Since then, he's been writing mainly Windows applications using C, C++/MFC, and since 2000, Microsoft .NET.

He now focuses on presentation tier .NET technologies such as ASP.NET, WPF, and Silverlight.

Dave has been a speaker at industry conferences, such as DevWeek, Tech Ed, IT Forum and Software Architect, and has written numerous articles for VSJ on topics ranging from Design Patterns to Silverlight. He also helps moderate Microsoft's ASP.NET Forums.

Dave has been a Microsoft Certified Trainer for many years, and has authored and delivered training courses for a wide range of organisations.

Tony has worked as a software developer, consultant and trainer for over 30 years, including four years as the Head of Technology for a multinational software corporation.

He now runs Whitter Technology (www.whittertechnology.com), a .NET development, consultancy and training firm based in Europe and is an instructor for DevelopMentor (www.develop.com). Tony has authored a popular series of .NET training courses, trained numerous developers, spoken at major international conferences and worked closely with Microsoft on Visual Studio 2005.

More recent projects include the creation of e-learning content for the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.x Developer Resource Kits and client development using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

Leor Zolman is a C++ Instructor for Developmentor. He is principal of BD Software, has been a programmer and software development educator since 1975.

During that time Leor has developed C and C++ software development tools (BDS C and STLFilt), written a book (Illustrated C) plus many magazine articles while on staff at The C/C++ User’s Journal, and has been writing/delivering public and on-site corporate training on C/C++, Unix, Java, Perl and other topics since 1988. While he’s not LinkedIn, Leor may be reached by email at leor@bdsoft.com.