Technical Expertise

Professional Experience

Working initially on part-time contract and then full-time for a company in Malvern that provides homeopathic equipment (and supporting software) to a base of several hundred customers around the world. This is a small company of just 7 employees so my role has been rather wide ranging:

• Sole developer of the company website, http://www.wds-global.com written in vb.net (asp.net), and SQL Server. The website has 185 pages, and includes an online shopping cart with an https section supporting credit card transactions to a PayPal web-service.
  
  
• Mission Control, an internal management system for managing the customer database, providing staff with an interface to some of the data on the website (via a webservice), invoicing and stock control. There is also a Windows service application for data synchronisation between the company website and the local Mission Control database.
  
  
• Computer Clear, a retail software product (available in English, German, and Japanese) which is available on CD or by download from the online shop. This program uses homeopathic principles to help the body to resist the radiation from the computer, and has received many glowing testimonials and enthusiastic feedback from customers. Installer written in InstallAware, with a simple database provided by the SQL Server Compact Edition.
  
  
• Part-way through a complete redesign and recoding of the company flagship product (e-Lybra) which is currently being developed with Visual Basic 2010 (in order to take advantage of the Task Parallelism available in the NET Framework 4), SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, Infragistics NetAdvantage, DotNetBar. The core program is being written as a Windows WPF application, and also comprises a Windows Service application.
  
  
• Installation routines (written in InstallAware) for the existing version of the e-Lybra software (which was written by somebody else).
  
  
• Responsible for all customer technical support, whether by phone, email or in person.
  

Was contacted on an as-required basis by IA Computing to resolve any SQL Sever issues that arose among their client base

Also completely redeveloped the company website in 2005, although this has since been heavily modified again

A requirement for a language translation company to provide an editing environment for non-technical translation staff to edit the resource strings within Visual Studio 6 ".RC" , ".HLP", and ".CNT" files led to the development of an editing suite. This software was used by the translators to convert .RC files from software projects into such languages as Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, as well as many European languages. I am also provided general technical consultancy during this phase to ensure the success of the translation assignment.

Economatics (Education) Ltd have sold a flowcharting application called Logicator to secondary schools across Britain for several years. The application allows a child to construct a flowchart by dragging and dropping items onto a grid, defining flow lines between each item, and then controlling electronic devices as the flow runs. The functionality within this application is in accordance with the National Curriculum for schools. As part of an ongoing investment in their technology Economatics decided to rewrite the entire codebase for this application using .NET technology, and contacted me to write the user interface portion, namely flowcharting (using GDI+), drag and drop, serialisation (using XML), and printing functionality. The visual appearance of the application is greatly improved from the previous version and conforms to the Microsoft Office 2003 style. The application demonstrated at the BETT 2004 show at Olympia in London. For further information see http://www.economatics-education.co.uk/economatics/

Wrote a suite of programs using Visual Basic.net and SQL Server 2000 that imported cash payment data into an existing credit control system, and also an export program that made data available for a third-party system on a daily basis.

Maintenance and redesign of existing web sites, creation of new sites, ongoing content creation for e-Med. This role was performed using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX.

• Mortgage account type switcher intranet application
  Intranet application that allowes customers to switch from one mortgage product type to another. Designed the overall architecture and the security model for the system. Also wrote ASP pages. Software involved: Visual InterDev, Visual Basic 6, IIS/MTS, SQL Server 2000
  
  
• XML Parser Service
  This general purpose service is available upon the Nationwide corporate network to accept XML-based requests for data to and from the ICL mainframe via HTTP. This application was written to run as a service on a dedicated load-balanced Windows NT server pair. Software involved: Visual Basic 6, MS XML parser 3.0, Visual InterDev (for ASP pages to handle HTTP conversations), IIS/MTS.
  
  
• Conversion of Microsoft Access system to use SQL Server
  A Microsoft Access system to verify the quality of mortgage lending was initially developed as a prototype but, as if often the case, quickly came to be used as the core system for this department. Performance problems quickly appeared as the application came to be used over the network, so a tactical solution was devised to move the actual data over to a SQL Server backend but retain the Access forms while a longer-term strategic solution was formulated. Software involved: Microsoft Access, SQL Server 7.0.
  
  
• Tactical solution to manage daily interest account updates
  In order to get running with Daily Interest type mortgage accounts as quickly as possible, the Nationwide required a tactical solution that would process transactions upon staff accounts which were piloting the scheme. Concurrently, a separate mainframe team were developing a strategic solution. Software involved: Visual Basic 6, MSDE
  
  
• Data upload/download component for Remote Arrears Processing application
  The Remote Arrears Processing system was an ongoing project by the time I joined it. The nature of the application suite was to enable the Nationwide's sales force to pull down arrears case data onto their laptops around the country, make visits as necessary, update the data, and then upload the changes. This involved exchanging both Access-based data (via replication) and direct communication with the ICL mainframe. Software involved: Visual Basic 6, Microsoft Access 97
  
  
• Automated letters production application
  Replacement of an antiquated Windows 3.0-based system which communicates with the ICL mainframe to look for events which occur on accounts being processed by both the Legal department and the Possessions and Recoveries department. When events occur letters are automatically generated by this application and printed locally for staff to sign and post. This application was written to run as a service running on each user's machine. Software involved: Visual Basic 6, Word 97
  
  
• Y2K-initiated rewrite for Housing department
  An existing Visual Basic 3.0 application (which I had worked on earlier, see below) was identified as suitable for a rewrite because much of the functionality of the department had altered and the application no longer matched. This was a networked application that was used by some 30 users to store property details as security for each loan given to housing associations by the Nationwide Housing department. Software used: Visual Basic 5, Microsoft Transaction Server, SQL Server 7.0
  
  
• Y2k-initiated rewrite of data warehousing application
  The opportunity arose to rewrite a system that I had previously written in 1994. The reason for the rewrite was that the software available was much more sophisticated and could therefore speed up overall processing significantly. The nature of the system was to read a copy of the entire mortgage book once a month from magnetic tape and import the data into a SQL Server database for analysis by the Finance department. When the system was originally written only DB-Library existed to import the data, and the job typically took about three days to complete. With this rewrite it was possible to use SQL Server's Data Management Objects (SQL-DMO) and this reduced to data upload time to a matter of hours. Software involved: Visual Basic 5, SQL Server 7.0.
  
  

A major rewrite of the company sales ordering system was taking place for this company which produces marketing data, which included both the processing of sales orders and the actual production of marketing data. My role was to produce the business and data tiers of the sales ordering part of the system. The role also expanded to writing a major part of the SQL Server database for the rest of the system, quality assurance (code reviews etc), and general troubleshooting. Software involved: Visual Basic 4, SQL Server 6.5, Microsoft Transaction Server

• Security application and quality assurance for Housing department application
  An external software house was brought in to develop a suite of software applications to cater for the needs of the Housing department (Housing give loans to Housing Associations). Although I wrote a central security administration application for user logins (this was before the days of integrated NT security), my primary role was to oversee the quality of the system and generally act as 'fixer'.
  
  
• Arrears MIS Data Server
  A consistent problem that the Nationwide had at this time was in providing ad-hoc data to external bodies such as the Council of Mortgage Lenders and the Building Society's Ombudsman, when typically such requests for data had to be answered within 30 days. The problem here was that it involved pulling a mainframe programmer from his/her task and writing a specific query program, followed by the overhead of then putting the program live etc. It was decided to create a SQL Server installation (before the term Data Warehouse became fashionable) that would have a monthly snapshot of the mortgage database. To enhance the system a set of twelve generations of monthly data was kept. To make this work the monthly data was written to magnetic tapes by the mainframe. My application then utilised a standalone tape reader and a suite of C programs obtained data via the device driver and wrote the data to SQL Server via DB-Library. Software involved: Microsoft OS/2 1.3, SQL Server 4.2, C
  
  
• Sales Administration System prototype
  The Society wanted to pilot the use of PowerBuilder (version 1) and so asked me to write a prototype application to calculate commission for sales made by the Society's sales force. At the time PowerBuilder was too unstable and so I rewrote the application using Visual Basic and C.
  
  
• Resource Management System
  Before the launch of Windows 3.0 I used to develop applications in Clipper. The Resource Management System collected workload statistics from both of the Nationwide's mainframes (via magnetic tape) and calculate the overall workload for each branch. This was then compared against a formula to calculate the theoretically-available manpower for each branch to determine their efficiency.
  
  
• Departmental efficiency systems (various)
  Similar to the Resource Management System (above), a series of smaller applications were written in Clipper to calculate the efficiency of individual departments.
  
  

Writing a suite of course modelling software applications that course tutors would use to model the costs and resource requirements of new courses. Software involved: dBase III+, Clipper (a dBase compiler), and SuperCalc.

From my initial start as a trainee COBOL programmer I wrote several mainframe programmes, particularly involving the Anglia's general ledger. I also became something of a local expert on magnetic tapes and PCs.

Training History

NB I still work to keep my knowledge current by watching Channel 9 videos on the MSDN site