Do you know who Brian Harry is? Well, other than following the handy link I provided to his blog Brian is a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division (the product group that builds Visual Studio, Expression, the .NET Framework and related technologies and tools) at Microsoft. To paint the right picture, that is a pretty senior technical role in our product groups. More importantly Brian is one of the brains behind out ALM (application lifecycle management) tools, formerly known as Team System. Here is a brief bio on Brian...

Our keynote speaker, Brian Harry, is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server - a server-based product designed to dramatically improve the productivity, predictability, and agility of software development teams by ensuring that all team members have easy access to the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time.

Brian worked at start up, DaVinci Systems, doing electronic mail software from 1988 to 1992. In 1992 Harry left DaVinci Systems with two others to create One Tree Software. One Tree, was a classic garage-type startup company that developed and sold SourceSafe (the same product that is now Microsoft Visual SourceSafe). One Tree Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1994.

After joining Microsoft, Harry worked in what was then the Tools and Databases division. For a couple of years he worked on SourceSafe and then on Microsoft Repository. In 1996 he and others began working on the problem of improving the approachability of API for the developer masses. Although this started as investigation of ways to extend COM it eventually grew into what we now know as the Microsoft .NET Framework. Harry served as the Development manager for the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and then as the Product Unit Manager through the rest of the V1 and most of the V1.1 product cycle.

Why am I sharing all this background on Brian? Well, he is coming to Chicago, IL for an afternoon presentation (3pm to 6pm) on Thursday, March 4, 2010. He will be at the Clarity Consulting offices at One North Franklin Street, Suite 3400, Chicago, IL 60606.

Register here to attend the event and come here an incredible presenter deliver a great talk on Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010.