I joined Microsoft 7 years ago, after a 5 years’ experience as a self-employed consultant for Enterprise customers, speaker in the most important Italian IT conferences and trainer in the biggest Italian CPLS. I started working in the data access, management and analysis space many years ago when, after my formal CS studies, in 1990 I began my career in the industrial automation and process control industry, working with 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers and assembler compilers. I met Microsoft SQL Server and data access technologies in late 1993 and never stop loving them. In the meantime i spent time working on MTS, COM+, and then .NET, since it publicly appeared in summer 2000, in distributed, highly transactional scenarios. I also had the opportunity to work with several Oracle DBMS versions, both using Java and .NET as client technologies. In 2003, few month before joining Microsoft, I also had the opportunity to write a book (in Italian) about my beloved technologies called “ADO.NET Full Contact”.