| I
spent much of my early years in development but know that I
wanted to gain additional skills. So I worked in Network Engineering
for a while, got an MCSE and then as a Project Manager for a
networking company.
For the last 4 years I have been back managing
development. At Visual Fire we did mostly Microsoft COM, ASP
and SQL work, including a string of Ecommerce projects. Since
then I have done more Java, C++ and .NET stuff. A lot of it
is web but more recently back to 'rich' client stuff. At the
time I put together this web site I was really deep into Java
so the site is mostly JSP.
At Ecometry our application server includes
COBOL transactions, C and C++ components and some Java connecting
to a MS SQL or Oracle RDBMS. Our clients include terminal emulation,
web interfaces and our VB 6.0 based clients. We are a Microsoft
Gold Certified Partner and I have been working with Microsoft
on a number of R&D projects and a .NET prototype. I am working
on converting our GUI clients to .NET, which is a pretty big
undertaking. We did a joint R&D project with Microsoft which
focused on interoperating COBOL, C & Visual Basic 6.0 with
.NET. That was a great and very interesting experience.
Several years ago I was a heavy user of Microsoft
DNA, and a sharp critic of it. I had really moved into Java,
LAMP, BEA, all of which I like quite a bit. Over the last three
years I have really been impressed with the progress Microsoft
has made since then. Windows 2003 Server, .NET, Visual Studio.NET,
IIS 6.0 are all impressive improvements over their predecessors.
If they keep up this level of innovation they are going to be
very difficult to compete against.
My main personal interest is C#. I was an early
users or ASP.NET with C#. More recently I have been giving Winforms
a chance and really enjoy it. At Ecometry I head up our R&D
on Windows 2003, Longhorn & Yukon and am real optimistic
about Microsoft's technology. I like the idea of XAML. It essentially
allows you to "embed" managed .NET code into a CDATA
section of an XML file much like you might embed SQL statements
into programming code. Combine that with the new XML data type
in Yukon and the ability to write stored procedures in C# or
VB.NET and you have the makings of a great development platform.
I am a beta user of Whidbey, which is Microsoft's
code name for Visual
Studio 2005. It seems like a nice improvement over VS.NET
but I need to get into the CLR differences and I am eager to
see Team Services, which is not out with the Beta, before passing
judgment.
Take a look at my project
lists for some samples of work I have done. I have always
tried to learn a broad range of stuff. So I have worked in network
engineering, integration, consulting, development, project management
and architecture.
|