Eric Nelson / Microsoft
Eric has been in Microsoft UK for twelve years and has spent most of that time helping Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to explore and adopt the latest technologies and tools from Microsoft – from SQL Server 7.0, IIS 1.0, DCOM, MTS and Visual Basic 6.0 in 1996 to .NET Framework 3.5, IIS 7.0 and SQL Server 2008 in 2008. Before joining Microsoft, Eric was a Unix developer working with C and 4GLs, writing high-performance calculation engines and delivering line of business solutions built on top of Sybase, Ingres and other RDBMS packages. He has presented at many different conferences including TechEd, DevWeek, Software Architect, SPA and QCon. In 2008 Eric switched focus away from ISVs to focus on working with the Visual Basic .NET development community in the UK to help them take advantage of the latest development technologies. Eric blogs about "the latest dev stuff" and "Visual Basic stuff" at http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel. His top 5 list of great products from Microsoft includes SQL Server and Visual Basic 1.0 but does not include Frontpage or DCOM.
IIS 7.0 – probably the best web server in the world
A lap (or two!) around Microsoft SQL Server