"Chris Anderson is a software architect working on the Windows Client team responsible for the technologies code named “Avalon”.  Chris has worked on the .NET Framework class libraries (including Windows Forms and ASP.NET).  Prior to that worked on the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), Visual J++ 6.0, and Visual Basic 6.0.  Chris has given presentations at many conferences around the world, and this will make his third appearance at PDC."

I hate writing bios for conferences... It always sounds like you are bragging about yourself... My first conference my then manager helped me write an awesome bio - i can't remember the exact words but it went somthing like:

"Chris Anderson was born in the mountains of Switzerland where he was raised by wild mountain goats. He stumbled into a village when he was young where they took him in and taught him to code. Now he works at Microsoft and has mostly stopped eating the foliage."

Marc had a much better flair for this stuff (yes, this is the same person that named a variable fBobDoleIsGod), but you get the idea.

One thing I like about JavaOne is that the speakers always have to justify to the audience why they should be allowed to speak. You end up with the various people giving you at least a couple sentances about what they do and how that makes them an authority on the topic.

So let me see, why should anyone believe what I say at the PDC?

I have worked on the .NET Framework since it's inception (depending on how you track the history of the .NET Framework I'm sure that people can claim they started earlier than me - especially some of the folks on the CLR team - but I was there from pretty early on). With Longhorn the .NET Framework is going to be even more important to the OS.  In addition I have been working with the Avalon team for almost 2 years now, and I have been an architect on the team for the past 10 months (I'm pretty sure the transfer happened in November?)...

The Avalon team was formed quite a while ago (I believe almost 3 years ago), and my involvement before I joined the team was mostly around helping them with the programming model. Even so, in the past 10 months I think that I have managed to get pretty deep into the product... After the PDC I'll regale you with some of the stories of the fun we have had this year!