Joseph Hall has been a professional software developer for nearly 30 years. He worked as a programmer for Microsoft, IBM, and ThoughtWorks. He was the CTO for an online ticket sales and servicing company, and he was the software architect for a Fortune 500 bank before starting his own consulting company in 2006.

Joe makes his living writing desktop, web, and mobile device applications for businesses, but game programming is his passion, and it was gaming that got him into programming in the first place. He was a member of the original Xbox team and he joined the Visual Studio .NET team just after the Xbox was released in 2001. Joe is the author of XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360, which was published in 2007.

Joe also dabbles in sketching, cartooning, and creating 3D models. Those who've seen his artistic creations understand why he makes his living as a programmer.

Joe's homepage: http://www.joehall.net/