Carl Franklin is Executive Vice President of App vNext, a software development firm focused on the latest methodologies and technologies. Carl is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, co-host and founder of .NET Rocks!, the first and most widely listened to podcast for .NET developers, a Microsoft MVP for Kinect for Windows, a Microsoft Regional Director, and Senior Executive of Pwop Studios, a full-service audio and video production/post production studio located in Southeastern Connecticut.

He was awarded the MVP for Kinect because of his work on gesture recognition. Namely, KinectTools and GesturePak. KinectTools is an abstraction over the Kinect 2.0 SDK that takes the detail work out of using the Kinect in a Windows application. GesturePak lets you record, edit, and recognize gestures in a Windows application. Both are free open source products.

Carl is also the creator of Music to Code By, a set of 25-minute long instrumental music pieces designed to get you into a state of flow and keep you there. Music to Code By has been praised widely by developers for keeping them focused and helping them solve difficult problems.

Carl has been a leader in the .NET community since 2002, and in the Visual Basic (VB) community before that. In the very early days he wrote for Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal, authoring the Q&A column of that magazine as well as many feature articles for VBPJ and other magazines. He has authored two books for John Wiley & Sons on sockets programming in VB, and in 1994 he helped create the very first web site for VB developers, Carl & Gary's VB Home Page.

Before he started .NET Rocks! in 2002 (three years before the word ‘podcast’ became popular) he developed and taught hands-on training classes for VB.NET and ASP.NET via his training company, Franklins.Net.

Carl has spoken regularly at conferences around the world, such as DevIntersection, NDC, NDC London, OreDev, Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft TechEd Europe, DevTeach, DevReach, and others.

In addition to his work in the development field, Carl works in the music business as a composer, recording engineer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist. With his band, the Franklin Brothers, he has produced two albums, Lifeboat to Nowhere and Been a While. Both albums get nothing but five star reviews. Noted guitar virtuoso John Scofield has collaborated with Carl on two songs, Chain Reaction and Groove or Get Out of the Way.