Neil Whitlow: Developer

I've been a professional software developer for over 16 years, but I've actually been developing software since I convinced my parents to get me a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas in 1981.

I have to laugh when I think back to being an 11 year old trying to convince my folks that it was more than just an expensive video game machine. I guess their last doubt disappeared when they saw that I started buying Compute Magazines (with type in program listings) and many books on programming in Commodore BASIC. For me to spend my yard mowing money on anything other than a Science Fiction paperback meant I was really hooked. I'd sit for hours reverse engineering magazine code and devouring the books on basic. I still have my VIC-20 (much to my wife's annoyance).

I am blessed to have been able to work with Microsoft .NET (C# in particular) since the early betas of the original .NET Framework in 2001. So I guess that's over 7 years now that I've been delivering solutions in C# with experience in all versions of the .NET Framework. How time flies.

I spent many years developing in all versions of Visual Basic for Windows from 1.0 to 6.0 before converting almost exclusively to C#. (good old legacy apps in VB 6.0 need occasional maintenance, or wrappers for COM and .NET interop now and then)

Before (and during) the VB 1.0 - VB 4.0 era, I also worked for many years with compiled basic (Microsoft QuickBasic 4.5). QuickBasic 4.5 was much better than the Visual Basic version MS built for DOS.

Believe it or not, I even spent almost the first 2 and half years of my career with MicroFocus Cobol on DOS and OS/2.