Bruno Evangelista is a lead programmer at Tectoy Digital (TTD.com). Previously, he was a graphics programmer at Ilusis (Ilusis.com) and a software engineer at Olympya (Olympya.com).
As an XNA developer, Bruno was a finalist in the first and second Microsoft XNA Challenge Brazil. He also maintains an open source skeletal animation library for XNA, named XNAnimation (Codeplex.com/xnanimation).
Besides his professional experience, Bruno had hosted some talks and courses about game development at conferences, including SIBGRAPI, SBGAMES and Microsoft Gamefest (Brazil). Bruno received bachelor's degree in computer science from Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and is a master's student in computer science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He lives in the beautiful city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His works can be found at BrunoEvangelista.com.
Alexandre Lobão is a passionate man. His first passion was reading, starting with large books—Mark Twain, Érico Veríssimo, Jules Verne, Monteiro Lobato, Alexandre Dumas, and others—when he was 7. At age 12, he discovered his next two passions: playing and creating games (by that time on his first Apple computer), and writing.
Many years later—he's about forty now—these passions still flourish. Now he's a teacher of academic game development courses, has written four books on the topic, and has participated in Brazilian gamse development contests, both as a contestant and as a judge. He has also written short story books, children's books, and young adult books, and in 2008 he released his first romance,
The Name of the Eagle, currently available only in Portuguese. And, of course, he still loves to read, some favorite authors being Ken Follett and Paulo Coelho.
His ultimate passions—starting in 1995 and still burning—are his wife, Waléria, and his kids, Natália and Rafael. Alexandre believes that lives needs passion to be lived entirely, and hopes that this book helps light this passion in readers' hearts. You can find his work at AlexandreLobao.com.
Riemer Grootjans received his degree in electronic engineering with a specialization in informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. He is a member of a research team working toward a Ph.D, and is responsible for visualization of 3D data. For several years, Riemer has been maintaining a web site with tutorials for DirectX. Since the early beta stages of XNA in 2006, he has ported all his content to XNA and is helping more than 1,000 people on their path to XNA success every day. In July 2007 and 2008, he received the Microsoft "Most Valuable Professional" Award for his contributions to the XNA community.
José Antonio Leal de Farias has been a games programmer since he acquired his first computer in 1985, when he tried to draw aliens on an 80x25 pixel screen. After obtaining a degree in computer science, he established one of the first game companies in Brazil in 1997, called Hardcode Entertainment. He has worked on many diverse gaming projects in Europe and the U.S. In 2004, he received the "Most Valuable Professional" award from Microsoft for his contributions to the Brazilian coding community. In 2006, he established the Sharp Games community, devoted to studying and spreading advice about the XNA platform. You can find the portal for Sharp Games at SharpGames.net.
