Kate Gregory, Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto, Ontario, is a founding partner of Gregory Consulting Limited. For the past 17 years her firm has been developing software using tools like .NET, XML, Web Services, VC++, VB, C#, ASP, Java, and Perl. Kate teaches and develops courses for a variety of corporate clients and is an adjunct faculty member at Trent University. She is in demand as an expert speaker, with five cross-country tours for Microsoft Canada in the past two years, and talks at Tech Ed USA and Europe. Kate is the author of numerous books for Que Publishing, including four editions of Special Edition Using Visual C++. She also writes a Visual C++ column at CodeGuru.