Bill Evjen is an active proponent of .NET technologies and community-based learning initiatives for .NET. He has been actively involved with .NET since the first bits were released in 2000. In the same year, Bill founded the St. Louis .NET User Group (www.stlnet.org), one of the world’s first such groups. Bill is also the founder and former executive director of the International .NET Association (www.ineta.org), which represents more than 450,000 members worldwide. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Bill is an acclaimed author (more than 13 books to date) and speaker on ASP.NET and XML Web services. In addition to writing, Bill is a speaker at numerous conferences, including DevConnections, VSLive, and TechEd. Along with these items Bill works closely with Microsoft as a Microsoft Regional Director and he has received the Microsoft MVP designation for many years. Bill is the Technical Architect for Lipper (www.lipperweb.com), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reuters, the international news and financial services company. He presently keeps his weblog at geekswithblogs.net/evjen/.