Greetings!
My name is Mike Stephenson and I am a self-employed engineer and software developer. Naturally, my interest in software includes engineering applications. I started the website engineering-software.com back in the early days of the Internet. My original plan was to catalog and resell engineering software so engineers could go to the site and have a fair chance of finding something that will ease their lives.
I started doing freelance work as early as 1989, mostly in the form of engineering consulting. I was working at a company called Solar Turbines (owned by Caterpillar) and I was given an assignment to develop a data acquisition software application for a test rig that we were developing. I always enjoyed programming, so I dived into it and have never looked back. Around that time, I decided I was going to do what I am now doing. Decision is the first step. I had very few skills. I knew Fortran programming and I had just learned QuickBasic, but neither were going to allow my to develop real, saleable engineering applications. So I decided to learn C. It was C that was being used to produce most commercial applications though Turbo Pascal was also being used for this. C allowed me the opportunity to directly access the video memory and you can make apps very responsive. Ever since then, I look for tools that enable me to create responsive applications. So I purchased Borland's C compiler (this was also in 1989) and I quickly learned enough to be dangerous and then decided object oriented programming was where it's at, so I dived into C++. I then became a serious, hard-core C++ developer and started picking up freelance gigs. I even wrote a few articles for the Borland Developer's Journal (now defunct). I even dived into Pascal around the mid-1990s and this sequed quite nicely into Delphi, which debuted in Februrary 1995. However, I waited a few months (I never much liked being a guinea pig). So I picked up Delphi in October 1995 and had my first real project in Delphi before Christmas.
I instantly developed a love affair with Delphi. It was elegant, fast and the IDE was slick and unimposing. Anders Heilsberg really is a remarkable individual and here's a great big thank you for making my life easier. I use Delphi to this day for any type of Win32 development, though I do have an occassional foray into C# WinForms. Of course Anders is responsible for C# as well. As a language, I like C# as much as Delphi. I prefer the performance of Delphi apps for native 32-bit applications. Delphi trumps C# (and VB) in this regard.
When it comes to the web, my chosen environment is C#, asp.net web applications. Having gone through the growing pains of ASP development, I can assure you this is the right way to write web applications. I think .net is a very well designed framework and I really believe this is one case where Microsoft hit a home run on its first try.
I decided to start a blog for a few reasons:
1) Others have encouraged me to do so
2) I really enjoy writing - it clarifies your thoughts
3) I enjoy helping people and I hope this blog helps you even in some small way