C# Programming Evolution

This book delivers what readers have been asking for by teaching valuable .NET techniques in the context of a complete, working application. The application is presented at the start of the book and is then used as the basis for a variety of activities that build the readers' ability, knowledge and confidence. The example application, a survey tool, can be easily adapted to a wide variety of tasks that require the collection and processing of information within an organization. The advice provided in the book makes it very easy for readers to customize the application to their particular needs. This means that readers get a great starting point for their own projects.

Kevin Hoffman started programming on a Commodore VIC-20 donated by his grandfather. Ever since then, he has been hopelessly addicted to programming. Instead of spending time outside, absorbing rays from that big yellow thing (he's not even sure what it's called), he spent most of his time as a kid and up through high school and college learning as many programming languages as he could get his hands on. At one time or another, he has written applications in ADA, Assembly, Scheme, Lisp, Perl, Java, Python, Tcl/Tk, C, C#, VB.NET, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Visual Basic, VAX/VMS Pascal and BASIC, dozens of proprietary scripting languages, PL/SQL and probably a few more that he can't remember. Oh, and he's even written a few programs for OS/2 and Mac OS X.

He started out working for a company that produces scientific instruments. He wrote code that interfaced PCs with data logging and gathering tools as well as real-time data analysis programs. From there he moved on to working technical support for Unix systems, PCs, SQL databases and client/server applications. After that he made the infamous jump to a dot-com, where he wrote an extensive amount of Visual Basic, VBScript and ASP code. After another job working with another n-Tier, COM-based ASP application, he moved to Houston, where he now endures the heat with his wife, dog and two cats while working on ASP.NET and Web service applications, providing public records search Web sites and services.