Jeffrey T. Fritz – or simply “Fritz” is a Program Manager for Microsoft on the ASP.NET and .NET Community Outreach teams.  He has lead the ASP.NET Web Forms, and WCF teams and managed the MSDN Web Developer Tools blog.  He plans and assists in delivering all .NET and Visual Studio developer content at major Microsoft conferences.  Additionally, he manager the Microsoft MVP program’s interactions with the Visual Studio and .NET product teams.  Previously at Microsoft, he ran the NuGet package manager for a year. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, INETA Community Champion and Developer Advocate for Telerik.  He is the author of several e-books about ASP.NET development practices, and he has over 15 years of experience building large-scale multi-tenant web applications in the software-as-a-service model.  He is a Penn State graduate with a degree in Management Sciences and Information Systems,and speaks regularly at developer events through the INETA speaker program.

His first book, “Learn ASP.NET Core in 24 Hours” is available from Amazon.

Jeffrey holds the unique distinction of being the only person to have his comments read on the DotNetRocks podcast, a winner of the DotNetRocks fanclub give-away, and appear as a guest on DotNetRocks  and TheTabletShow.

Jeffrey got started coaching others in software programming as early as age 9, when he was selected to assist other students in another classroom with their LOGO programming assignments.  Helping those students move the little turtle around the screen just set in motion a lifetime of teaching computing.  Years later, Jeffrey graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Management Sciences and Information Systems.  A degree that gave him a programmers skill-set and a manager’s eye for marketing, accounting, and finance.

After school, the first job presented to Jeffrey was a consultant role for First Consulting Group in the Pharmaceutical industry.  After bouncing around several assignments and learning some elementary coding style, Jeffrey left to join a .com startup in the financial industry.  This startup Advisorport.com, relied on Jeffrey to build their first website that featured a collection of original reporting and data collection features.  Jeffrey built a financial proposal generation wizard, that would output PDF documents tailored for customer’s specific financial needs.

After departing Advisorport, Jeffrey became a Technical Lead at Telerx – a customer service call-center company.  At Telerx, Jeffrey would sharpen his toolset in the .Net space and start to embrace agile methodologies to deliver cutting edge solutions to customers.  As this mindset started to sink in with Jeffrey, he departed Telerx for Frontline Technologies.

At Frontline, Jeffrey participated in the development of one of the busiest “software as a service” applications in the United States.  He brought innovative ideas, development standards, and raised the level of software quality being delivered through agile methodology techniques like unit testing.  While at Frontline, Jeffrey started to engage the INETA (International .Net User Group Association) and participated in lecturing at several user groups, code camps, and other events.  This lecturing / coaching experience caught on with Jeffrey and he began documenting and sharing his experiences on Twitter and his blog.  With some success in those areas, he reached for more and joined Telerik.

Telerik gave Jeff a tremendous opportunity to reach more developers than ever before.  He spent a lot of time writing blog posts, e-books, presentations, webinars, and the occasional training course.  While preparing for a webinar at the end of October, the trademark pirate hat gimmick was launched.  With that look, Jeff became the ASP.NET pirate – with the ability to force ASP.NET web forms and applications to do extraordinary things they were never intended to do.  All good things must come to an end, and Jeff departed Telerik when the right opportunity with Microsoft came about.