About the Authors
JEFFREY PALERMO is a father of two (Gwyneth Rose and Xander) and a lucky husband. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the guitar badly and riding his Honda CRF450R dirt bike. In the business world, he is the CIO of Headspring Systems. Jeffrey has led the growth of Headspring’s consulting practice from a boutique development company to a multi-million dollar custom software firm. Recognizing software history, trends, fads, and the constant pendulum swing that is the technology industry, Jeffrey promotes a balanced approach that uses new lessons without discarding the advances of the past. Often ignoring industry fads, he advocates for a moderate, simple approach. Jeffrey has been recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for five years. He has spoken and facilitated at industry conferences such as VSLive, DevTeach, the Microsoft MVP Summit, various ALT.NET conferences, and Microsoft Tech Ed. He also speaks to user groups around the country as part of the INETA Speakers’ Bureau. A graduate of Texas A&M University, an Eagle Scout, and an Iraq war veteran, Jeffrey holds too many certifications to list and has published many magazine articles and two books, including this one.
Jeffrey Palermo is responsible for the popular “Party with Palermo” events that often precede major Microsoft-focused conferences. Started in June of 2005, Party with Palermo has grown in popularity and size. Typical events host hundreds of people for free drinks, finger food, and door prizes. It’s the perfect way to hook up with friends and colleagues before the conference week begins. You can see past and upcoming parties at http://partywithpalermo.com, where the website has run on ASP.NET MVC since October, 2007.
Finally, Jeffrey, along with Eric Hexter, co-founded the MvcContrib open source project, which today finds its home at the Microsoft-seeded CodePlex Foundation as the first non-Microsoft project to be admitted in the non-profit software foundation.
BEN SCHEIRMAN is a passionate software craftsman, speaker, author, and blogger. He enjoys programming on a multitude of platforms, such as .NET, Ruby on Rails, and iPhone. Ben is a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft ASP Insider, and Certified Scrum-Master. When not programming, Ben enjoys playing guitar, spending time with his wife and five wonderful children, or voiding warranties on his latest gadgets. Ben is the Director of Development for ChaiONE in Houston, TX. Read his blog, b#, at http://flux88.com.
JIMMY BOGARD is a Principal Consultant at Headspring Systems. He is an agile software developer with six years of professional development experience. He has delivered solutions from conception to production for many clients. The solutions delivered by Jimmy range from shrink-wrapped products to enterprise e-commerce applications for Fortune 100 customers. He is also a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) and is an active member in the .NET community, leading open source projects, giving technical presentations, and facilitating technical book clubs. Currently, Jimmy is the lead developer on the NBehave project (a behavior-driven development framework for .NET), AutoMapper (a convention-based object-to-object mapper), and the facilitator of the Austin Domain-Driven Design Book Club. Jimmy is a member of the ASPInsiders group, the C# Insiders group, and received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for ASP.NET in 2009.
ERIC HEXTER has been developing software professionally for 15+ years in consulting, product development, corporate IT, and for premium brand web sites and e-commerce. Eric is a huge advocate of agile project management and software engineering practices. Eric has learned the hard way that writing untestable, tightly coupled code gets you nowhere fast. In fact, that type of code usually keeps one in the same spot unable to change and adapt software to the ever-changing needs of the business that uses said software.
Eric is very active in the Austin developer community. Eric is a Director for the Austin .NET Users group. Eric has run the Austin Code Camp, which is a one-day developer conference, since 2007. In addition to his position in the Austin .NET Users Group, Eric has held the following positions: INETA Membership Mentor for South Texas, ASPInsider, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in ASP.NET, and founder of the Community for MVC virtual usergroup. Additionally, Eric blogs with Los Techies, a community-focused technology blogging community. Eric speaks to user groups and at technology conferences around Texas and the U.S.
Eric is blessed to have a beautiful wife (Chriss), two lovely daughters (Emerson and Elliott), and another child (name TBD) on the way! Eric spends as much quality time with his family as he possibly can.
MATT HINZE is a Principal Consultant at Headspring, an Austin, Texas-based software consulting firm. As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, Matt has been successfully delivering technical courses to software developers since 2005. Meanwhile he is a full-time developer working in the trenches on major software projects. Passionate about software and programming, Matt is active in the developer community and presents technical talks to community groups and at conferences. Matt is also a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, ASPInsider, and Microsoft MVP for C#.
About the technical editor
JEREMY SKINNER lives in the UK and works as a software developer. Most of his work involves writing web applications using ASP.NET and C#. He is involved with several open source projects including MvcContrib, Fluent Validation, and Fluent Linq to Sql. Jeremy is also a member of the ASPInsiders group.
Jeremy has been invaluable to both editions of this book. He has reviewed each paragraph of text, figure, and code example. He found and corrected numerous errors, and this book would not be what it is without him. He is capable of being an author himself, so expect full books out of him in the future. Jeremy’s experience with the ASP.NET MVC framework as well as popular third-party frameworks, such as Castle, has made him a strong reviewer. His blog, Technical Jargon, can be found at http://www.jeremyskinner.co.uk/.