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.