Curtis Taylor is a Principal Consultant at Infragistics, Inc. When he first started studying human interaction with products, objects and particularly software interfaces, he noticed people often believed they were dumb when they did not understand an interface. However, rather than fixing the problem, the industry standardized interfaces which lacked the ability to engage most users. The industry attempted to fix the user, rather than the interfaces. Designing interface is an interaction between user and developer. Two things drew him to Software Development—the abstraction of writing code and the challenge of presenting that abstraction to human beings in a way they can understand.
People are organic. Computers are not. So the work of making software interfaces more understandable, practical, and enjoyable became something he wanted to do. Software development is his connection to serving people. People are more important than things. Perhaps his message will be communicated in the interfaces he creates, the code he writes, and the feedback, training, and team-work he offers to other developers.
He loves WPF and Silverlight! So much so, Infragistics found and hired him to be a consultant and trainer. At Infragistics he works directly with customers helping them solve technical and UI-related issues with WPF and Silverlight, he provides training as a fellow software engineer, and he develops custom solutions for customers who wish to utilize their services a step beyond the capabilities of their products.
Michael Crump is an MCPD who has been involved with computers in one way or another for as long as he can remember, but started professionally in 2002. After spending years working as a System Administrator/Tech Support Analyst, Michael branched out and started developing internal utilities that automated repetitive tasks and freed up full-time employees. From there, he was offered a job working at McKesson corporation and has been working with some form of .NET and VB/C# since 2003.
Michael is currently serving as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and Content Editor on several other Silverlight publications. He resides in Birmingham, AL with his wife Amanda and children Ridley and Adrienne.
He shares his findings in his personal blog: http://michaelcrump.net, and he also tweets at @mbcrump.
Siddharth Mehta is a Business Intelligence professional with more than nine years of experience, and presently works in the role of a Technology Architect for Accenture Services Pvt. Ltd (Mumbai, India), in the capacity of an Associate Manager. Prior to Accenture, he has worked at Capgemini with clients including Walt Disney Pictures and Television, CitiBank, Transport for London, and ABN AMRO.
He started his career in 2002 with Visual Basic and SQL Server, and since then he has been majorly working with SQL Server, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Dimensional Modeling, Information visualization design, and related technologies. He is known for his writing in the field of Microsoft Business Intelligence. He has authored a whitepaper for MSDN Library, titled Bulk Report generation using SSIS and SSRS 2008 R2. He continues authoring content on MS BI for community sites such as MSSQLTips.com, SQLServerCentral.com, SQL-Server-Performance.com, and others. He has been the Technical Reviewer of the book Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development.
He has won awards such as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional CY'11, Capgemini India Envoy FY'10, and others through the course of his career. He shares his insights on business intelligence through his blog: http://siddhumehta.blogspot.com. He can be reached at <[email protected]>.