I'm A VB: Walter Sassano

 

·        How long have you been using VB?

Since VB4.0, so that’s about 13 or 14 years.

 

·        What industry do you work in?

I work for a Fortune 500 cosmetics company.

 

·        How big is your development team?

Our development teams tend to be small, from single developers to 4 or 5 developers.

 

·        What kind of apps do you most commonly build?

I build a lot of infrastructure / middleware applications and lately those are taking the form of web services.

 

·        What’s the most interesting app you’ve ever built?

I wrote an app a number of years ago that replaced a high performance middleware app written in C. There was great doubt at the time, in our oganization, that a VB.NET app could handle the volume of transactions that the legacy system handled during its peak.  But the new code and VB.NET were up to the challenge. The new app was more than capable of the volume and then some. Not an interesting app, but it most definitely changed perceptions about VB.NET’s abilities and place in enterprise applications.

 

·        Please tell us about an app that you’re working on at the moment.

I am currently working on two web services: One that provides identity verification functionality for a handful of externally facing client applications. And another that provides Active Directory functionality to other applications.

 

·        What other technologies do you most commonly use?

There are other technologies??? 🙂

 

·        What are some of your favorite VB features?

Intellisense. Can’t live without it anymore. Any time I have to fire up VB.NET 2005 I dread having to type everything. It’s the little things that make developers productive.

 

·        What do you like most about VB as a programming language?

It’s an elegant language. It’s striaghtforward, simple and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

 

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