Short biography
Laurent works as Director of UX Integration for IdentityMine, one of the leading companies (and Gold Partner) for Microsoft technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and generally User Experience. He is based in Zurich Switzerland, where he lives with his wife Chi Meei and his two daughters Alise and Laeticia.
In October 2010, the book "Silverlight 4 Unleashed" that he wrote was published at Sams, an advanced sequel to "Silverlight 2 Unleashed" (published Oct 2008). He codes in Silverlight, WPF, Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET and his blog is on http://blog.galasoft.ch. 2012 is his 6th year as a Microsoft MVP (Silverlight). He is also the author of the well-known open source framework MVVM Light for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.
Longer bio...
Laurent works as Director of UX Integration for IdentityMine. This firm from Seattle is one of the leading companies (and Gold Partner) in the field of Microsoft technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Surface, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and generally User Experience. Employing developers and designers working closely together, IdentityMine was mainly active in the US market, before 2008 when it opened a European branch based in Zurich, Switzerland. Laurent was IdentityMine's first European employee, based in Zurich Switzerland, where he lives with his wife Chi Meei and his two daughters Alise and Laeticia.
Between October 2007 and October 2008, Laurent wrote the book "Silverlight 2 Unleashed", published at Sams. Then in 2010 Laurent wrote "Silverlight 4 Unleashed", also published at Sams. These books are a complete tutorial about Silverlight, filled with code samples and illustrations in full color.
Originally an Electronics engineer, Laurent's interests moved to software very fast and he achieved a postgrade study in Software Engineering in 1999. Before joining IdentityMine, he worked at Siemens Building Technologies from 1996, where he helped introduce WPF and other .NET technologies at Siemens worldwide. His job involved developing with the mentioned technologies, training and coaching his colleagues, coordinating and integrating the graphics designers' work, and relationships with Microsoft.
Prior to that, he first wrote embedded C/C++, and then moved to desktop computers in Java, JavaScript, VB6, VBA and eventually .NET (WinForms and ASP.NET).
Privately, Laurent has also been very active, developing mainly websites and web applications in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, ASP and currently ASP.NET. He has done his best to contribute to the community, first in the JavaScript newsgroups, and then in Microsoft's newsgroups related to ASP.NET, C#, WPF and Silverlight. He blogs regularly on http://blog.galasoft.ch and writes on his website http://www.galasoft.ch where he also publishes articles, prototypes and demos related to the mentioned technologies. In 2008, he earned a MCTS for Windows Presentation Foundation. In 2009, he published the MVVM Light Toolkit, an open source toolkit helping to build decoupled applications in WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone. This toolkit is today the basis for many applications, small and big. It is still maintained and extended regularly.
2012 is Laurent's sixth year as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Silverlight. He was awarded "Silverlight MVP of the year" in 2010 and is recognized as one of the most prominent experts worldwide for Silverlight, XAML, Expression Blend and the MVVM pattern. He is a frequent conference speaker, and was invited to talk in very large conferences such as the MIX conference in Las Vegas (2009, 2010, 2011), TechEd Europe (2010) as well as multiple TechDays and other local conferences in the USA and in Europe.
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