Articles by Rob Harwood (Article: 1)

Born in England, I have been programming since a very early age when my dad gave me prewritten programs to type in and run on a Sinclair ZX81 machine (seeing my name printed out on a TV screen was enough to keep me entertained!). I later did work using basic and STOS basic on the Atari ST and after that got my first PC and used Microsoft's QBasic. Later when I was about 13 I was in an airport and saw a trial copy of Visual Basic on a magazine, which I bought and it got me hooked on the Microsoft development tools.

Currently I am studying a software engineering degree and have been working with .NET since 1.0. I have just moved over to Visual Studio 2005/.NET 2.0 and am loving it! During my degree I have worked for a year at DuPont, where I ended up changing a lot of their old existing software over to .NET and improving it in the process! Since then I have been back and done some consulting work involving maintaining some of their older C++/MFC software.

While most of my current interestes involve .NET I am also confident in working with C++ in Win32, VB, Java, and have even done some development work on the Linux platform (although most of this involved ensuring that software I wrote in C++ was platform independent).

I have a strong passion for software technology, both higher level and more recently, systems level stuff (the dissertation I am doing for my degree is to implement a small compiler and virtual machine in C# for a Pascal-style language).