Mike Meinz - Professional Profile

I’m retired. When I started my career, programming projects consisted of plugging wires into plug boards to create punch card processing applications to be run on electrical accounting machine like the IBM 402, 407, 085, 088, 514, 519, etc. From there, I moved to writing SPS and Autocoder applications on an IBM 1401 with 4K of memory eventually upgraded to 16K of memory. After many years of migrating my skills to various languages on various hardware platforms, I became an Information Technology Director where I didn’t need to program anymore. So, starting in 1996, I volunteered my time with a local community cable television organization and built some applications to help them run their operations. Originally in Clipper Summer 1987 and later Clipper 5.2, I migrated and enhanced those applications to VB .NET 2003 almost ten years ago. I retired in 2010 and since then have done a few enhancements but nothing much. Now, my VB .NET 2003 Solution is to be upgraded to VB .NET 2012 so that it can run on 64-bit computers and interact with Microsoft Office 2010. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my VB .NET 2003 Solution and all of the Projects within it were able to be opened by Visual Studio 2012. I had to correct more than 400 warnings about uninitialized variables that were initialized in “If” statement blocks or “Try” statement blocks. One error caused by an item that had been removed from the .NET Framework was easily corrected. I changed the use of a System.Net.Dns property from GetHostByName().AddressList to GetHostEntry().AddressList.