Helmut Obertanner was born in 1968 in Munich, Germany. After school, he became an Electronic Engineer, and his first experience with building computers came in 1985. On graduation, he started repairing Commodore Business Machines (PET). Later on, he specialized in repairing the legendary C64, Amiga and Atari consoles, and the very first PCs. From 1990 to 1995, he worked as a systems engineer, building heterogeneous networks with Windows NT, Novell, and Apple. After that, he was administrator for an architecture company, responsible for the entire IT communications, CAD, and Office support. In 2000, he changed to being an IT systems supplier, and worked as a technical consultant for Exchange Server, Antivirus, Firewalls, and Backup/Restore solutions. In 2002, he started developing Software, building Outlook add-ins with VB6. When the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 came out, he was one of the first to try and build managed add-ins for Office. Due to his technical knowledge, sample codes, and help to other Office Developers he was awarded the MVP for VSTO by Microsoft. He is always interested in working on new technologies.
Currently, he is working for PHARMATECHNIK GmbH & Co. KG in Starnberg, Germany, building software for pharmacies using .NET and C#.
Maarten van Stam holds a B.Sc in Computer science (Graduation in 1996, HIO, The Hague, The Netherlands), and has worked as a software engineer for over 20 years. He started programming dBase and Clipper (DOS) systems in the early 80's, followed by Pascal and C++ in the late 80's, C++ and VB "for Windows" in the early 90's, and continues to program in VB.NET and C# as part of the Microsoft's .NET Framework.
Maarten has specialized in Office development, .NET, and VSTO, and has received the Microsoft MVP award in the area of Visual Developer-VSTO for voluntarily sharing expertise with others. In addition to this role, Maarten takes part in several TAP programs, beta tests, software design reviews and advisory councils for software tools such as Visual Studio Team System and Microsoft Office. In addition to working in the software business professionally, Maarten is also an organizational member in the "Software Development Network", currently the largest developer community group in the Netherlands (www.sdn.nl ).
Besides tech-reading Beginning Office 2007 Development with VSTO, Maarten also reviewed Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook by Eric Carter and Eric Lippert (ISBN 0321533216).
Maarten's insights can be read and followed on www.maartenvanstam.nl, where you can find his blog all aspects of software development.
N Satheesh Kumar has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science Engineering and has around 12 years of experience in software development life cycle, project and program management. He is also a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP). He started his career developing software applications using Borland software products in a company based in India, and then moved to the United Arab Emirates and continued developing applications using Borland Delphi and customizing Great Plain Dynamics (now known as Microsoft Dynamics) for an automobile company. Later, he spent three years designing and developing application software using Microsoft products for a top multinational company, and then spent a couple of years in project management and program management activities. Currently, he works as a technical architect for a top retail company based in the United States. He works with the latest Microsoft technologies and has published many articles on LINQ and other features of .NET.
Satheesh is the author of the book LINQ Quickly, and has co-authored the book Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008.