Neil Kidd, Microsoft

Neil joined Microsoft towards the end of 2000, and have been in the Dev Tools team since July 2006, having moved over from Microsoft Consulting Services.

For the previous 2 1/2 years he'd been an Application Development Consultant, working with a variety of customers and partners assisting them across the whole of their development lifecycle. This pretty much covered the whole of the Microsoft development stack - from ATL to WinFx, in C++, C# and VB. During this time Neil tended to specialise in performance and scalability work. This started with tuning customer's applications in Microsoft's scalability labs in Reading and ended up with him talking at TechEd on writing performing application with the Compact Framework.

Before that Neil worked in the C++ team in PSS for just over 3 years; which has to be one of the best places in the world to learn about writing reliable and robust code. In his life before Microsoft, Neil worked for a very large car company writing their eCommerce sites.