I was born in Merseyside in 1964, and educated at Wirral Grammar School for Boys followed by Carlett Park College of Technology before going on to Leeds University to study Electronic Engineering.

Family Life, Keep Fit, Cooking, DIY, Motor Sport (watching not doing!).

Things that don’t work properly, aggressive people.

For me, the two hot topics of the day are WPF and LINQ. These exciting Microsoft technologies both appeared in .NET Framework 3.

WPF (and Silverlight – WPF for web sites) moves user interface design onto the next level. Out with dull grey forms, boring buttons and crude combo-boxes and in with a world of slick new designed user interface controls and styles that have not been seen before. I’ve written a very brief overview of these technologies and how I think they will literally change the face of software – click here for more...

LINQ isn’t exciting to look at but could have just as big an effect on software development as WPF. LINQ is a technology that is used in the innards of software and, in essence allows sophisticated queries and data manipulation operations to be done on in-memory object trees, SQL data and XML data directly from within the programming language.

Before joining Blueberry I moved around the UK in a variety of job roles:-

• Bedfordshire (First Job): Digital hardware design and embedded Software, Unilever Research (Food Manufacturing Systems) - 6809 assembler code, C running on bespoke hardware.
• Hampshire: (Second Job): Embedded Software design, Connolly Systems (TV Broadcast Systems) - 8086 assembler code, C, C++ running on bespoke hardware and MSDOS platform.
• WestMidlands: (Third Job): PC Software Programmer, Kelsey Instruments (Automotive/Aerospace) - C++ on MSDOS platform.
• Warwickshire: (Fourth Job): PC Software Programmer, Attention To Detail, (Computer Games, Small Business Systems) - C++ and System Programming on Windows platform.
• Warwickshire: (Fifth Job): Senior Systems Designer, Blueberry Consultants Ltd (bespoke Windows software) - C++, C# on Windows API and .NET Platforms.

VisualFAIR
.NET, C#, ASP.NET, MS-SQL, AJAX, WPF (Silverlight and XBAP). Dynamic PDF generation, Crystal Reports.

AEP – photo-book creation website.
Built using Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, MS SQLServer.

Chocolate Delight – a privately owned company that runs training course specialising in chocolate products.
ASP.NET, Kentico CMS.