752  The Future of the Web at Prairie DevCon

While at the Prairie DevCon in Calgary, Carl and Richard moderated a panel discussion on the future of the web with panelists James Kovacs, Andrew Nurse, Bil Simser and James Chambers. The conversation ranged over the quality of web content today and a general push to try and improve it, discussions around monetization, the fragmentation of HTML 5, the role of mobile and some of the cool new technologies coming down the pipe to make the web an even more amazing place to build applications for.

James Kovacs is a Technical Evangelist for JetBrains. He is passionate in sharing his knowledge about OO, SOLID, TDD/BDD, testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and related techniques.

He blogs on CodeBetter.com as well as his own blog, is a technical contributor for Pluralsight, writes articles for MSDN Magazine and CoDe Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups. He is the creator of psake, a PowerShell-based build automation tool, intended to save developers from XML Hell.

James is the Ruby Track Chair for DevTeach, one of Canada’s largest independent developer conferences. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto and his Master's degree from Harvard University.

Andrew Nurse is a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft on the Windows Azure Framework and Tools team. He is the primary developer on the Razor view engine and works on technologies like the ASP.Net WebPages Framework, ASP.Net MVC Framework, and NuGet. He lives in Seattle with his fiancee and two cats.

Bil Simser is a Solutions Architect with over 15 years in software development. He has helped build many large-scale mission critical systems along the way. In his role as a mentor, he guides clients on how to implement development standards and guidelines, evaluates and recommends new tools and technologies, and helps teams and projects progress into the .NET world. Bil also has a special interest in coaching clients on Agile and General Software Development Best Practices. Bil has been involved with Microsoft's .NET platform since the early betas and has a deep passion for good SOLID Architecture and Software Design. He specializes in SharePoint, .NET, Agile, TDD, Windows Phone 7 development, and computer game programming. Bil also runs several successful open-source projects and contributes to the software development community, taking the time to review and edit SharePoint and Agile publications, and speaking at user groups, code camps, and conferences, including TechEd, DevConnections, PDC, PrairieDevCon, and DevTeach. Bil has been a Microsoft SharePoint MVP since 2004 and a member of the MSDN Canada Speakers Bureau. Bil currently lives and works in Alberta, Canada, with his wife, daughter, a Beowulf cluster of computers, every gaming console known to man, and a small menagerie of animals.

James Chambers has been developing software since 1995 with a mix of languages on a myriad of platforms, eventually moving to the .NET stack in 2002. His broad industry exposure has seen him work in everything from oil and gas to healthcare, from public insurance to the food industry and at all three levels of government. A Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET/IIS, James spends his days working in web development, the MVC Framework, jQuery, web services and other areas, including competing frameworks, libraries and technologies. He is actively exploring Windows Azure and is a self-professed WP7 junkie.