A few words about me

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My name is Eric and I am a Virgo :-)

More importantly, as of June 2008 I am an Application Architect in Microsoft UK that has spent the last 12 years working with UK ISVs to help them explore and adopt the latest development technologies. On July 1st I switch teams to join Mike and Mike in the community team and replace working with a whiteboard (and Excel) with working with Visual Studio (again!). I can't wait! 

For the last 4 years I have blogged about "ISV stuff" (from code to licensing) but in my new role I will be spending far more time in Visual Studio cutting code and navigating through the new capabilities found in the .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 - which means a lot more posts containing code and a lot less about licensing. Phew! I plan to do most of my work  in Visual Basic .NET rather than C# which should help us create a better balance in the work our team delivers to help UK developers.

https://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel will remain my main blog and if you are a Visual Basic developer you should start to see it containing plenty of relevant posts.

For completeness, my brief history is:

  • 1986 Software Development on weird stuff using C, Fortran and BASIC :-)
  • 1989 Software Development on Unix and VAX using Assembly, 3GLs, 4GLs and plenty of RDBMS
  • 1995 Software Development on Unix and Windows - adding SQL Windows, Powerbuilder, various strange multi platform 4GLs and a little Visual Basic and Access 
  • 1996 Joined Microsoft for 2 years :-)
    • Advising Independent Software Vendors on development with the latest (beta) technologies from Microsoft
    • Visual Basic 6, MTS, ASP, COM+, MSMQ
    • .NET Framework 1.0 through to 3.5 using C#
    • SQL Server 7.0 through to SQL Server 2005
  • 2008 Still at Microsoft :-)