Bespoke Programming

Programming, especially around databases, gives my work variety and interest. I have Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition (the most advanced edition), and a large library of reference books and CD's relating to VB development.
For me (as it should be for all developers) the primary consideration when writing a program is the interface to the user. Snapper is an example of how I made a powerful application less daunting and therefore more usable, simply by making the interface familiar (i.e. like Windows Explorer).
There are many examples of my work which demonstrate my ability as a programmer, as I have been developing professionally since I was 21. Perhaps the most interesting was the hand-held PC application I wrote for a traffic-monitoring hardware company in Oxford (if clicking link, please see page dated 15th Oct). The brief was clear - it had to be extremely robust and fast enough to keep up with the high transfer rates of the serial ports on the roadside units. The finished application was created in eVB (VB for handhelds) with a separate (though integrated) downloader written in eVC (C++ for handhelds).
I can undertake development projects ranging from small- to large-scale, using VB or VBA (the code behind all of the Microsoft Office applications), or practically any other dialect of Basic.
All of the coding and documentation I do for clients (and for my own purposes) is to Microsoft standards and guidelines, following the RedBook naming conventions. If you want to follow in my footsteps then I can thoroughly recommend the following books:
  • Practical Standards for Visual Basic (ISBN 0-7356-0733-8)
  • Debugging Visual Basic (ISBN 0-07-212518-7)
  • Visual Basic Developer's Handbook ((ISBN 0-7821-1985-9)
  • Visual Basic from the Ground Up (ISBN 0-07-882508-3)
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