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Account and
Project Manager - Microsoft Technologies Team, at
EC|Wise, San Rafael, California, USA
2007 - present. Responsibilities:
Team management, solutions strategy, architecture and design.
Program Manager/Developer, dba Spacefold, for Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, USA
2003 - 2007. Responsibilities:
Full Program Manager responsibility for in-house base product development of the VFP 9 Reporting System during the Visual FoxPro 9.0 and 9.0 SP2 product cycles, from specification through completion, including language and IDE improvements, and extensibility architecture.
Development of shipping/out-of-the-box Xbase implementations of new reporting features.
External evangelist for new features, presenting conference sessions and serving as customer and
third-party vendor contact during alpha/beta test cycles.
Author of
Flying Fox: Applying Visual FoxPro Reporting to Any Data, in Any Environment,
teaching integration of VFP reporting features for MySQL developers.
MSFT User Ed/MSDN technical writing responsibility, including product documentation and white papers on XML integration scenarios using Office 2007 and XAML.
Programmer/Analyst, dba Spacefold, for Bally Technologies, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
2003 - 2007. Responsibilities:
Update and migration of various FoxPro systems. Liaison between FoxPro systems and other existing in-house systems (VisualBasic Classic, IBM-AS400, java-based) as well as new systems under development in the enterprise (Siebel, EDS-Team Center, Agile PLM) for analysis and two-way data translation.
Design and implementation of web services to warehouse and expose the heterogeneous data,
including full-scale enterprise reporting implementation. Fulfillment of additional data-mining and output
requirements, for external browser- and application- based clients, in .NET (both C# and VB.NET) components,
T-SQL, XML and XSLT.
Ad-hoc scripting solutions and other customizations for end-users in ASP.NET and
Microsoft-Office-based client code.
Coach/resource for in-house developers using SQL, MS Reporting Services, XML, and Siebel.
Admin responsibility for intranet web server, SQL Server installation and deployment,
and SQL Server Reporting Services exposure in the enterprise.
Integration Engineer/Solutions Architect, Acxiom Corporation, Little Rock, Arkansas,
USA
Homebased (San Rafael, CA and Las Vegas, NV) consultant Feb 1999, employee April 1999 – January 2003.
Participated in end-to-end proposal, design, and implementation of Oracle-Acxiom Alliances solution,
using IIS with ASP, VBScript and XML technologies. Authored DHTML, XSLT-driven interface driven by
the ASP solution and XML and visually based on Oracle products, as
a sample QuickLoad end-client ASP web application.
Provided end-result of the Oracle QuickLoad
data-mining solution, a branded analysis report, using Microsoft Excel automation and
Visual FoxPro-based COM objects.
Maintained and enhanced Apache SOAP Toolkit-based, Tomcat-hosted web services, to deliver real-time
and batch prospect and customer datasets hosted by Acxiom in XML format.
Enhanced performance and interoperability via new Java components and improved XSD/WSDL documents,
UNIX shell scripting.
Provided administrative, test, and demo facilities via Java beans, JSP, custom tag libraries on web server as
well as JavaScript/DHTML, Microsoft HTA, HTTP and Microsoft-SOAP Toolkit client test components.
Served as technical liaison to work with Microsoft-based SOAP partner-implementers.
Developed re-usable components and examples to Acxiom-enable Siebel installations, using Siebel
scripting and XSLT, with full Siebel courseware-style documentation.
Mentored customers' Siebel's developers for on-line implementation.
Created Java and XML/XSLT components for an IBM MQ-Series adaptor for plug-in,
real-time Acxiom Data Network (ADN) access. Design included a robust data element
mapping strategy, allowing easy customization for IBM implementers.
Created and taught training course in Acxiom on-line access via XML and Java to
Oracle internal development team. Created test tools via Internet Explorer-based DHTML
and JavaScript to provide a test environment for internal quality assurance
and performance statistics for the Acxiom on-line development team.
Created the first successful ADN SDK, written in Visual FoxPro components and exposed
through IIS. Created COM clients and a full end-user Wizard interface for public distribution,
promoting external access of the ADN 1.x API, including full HTML/CHM developer and end-user documentation.
Provided additional customized clients, integration research, technical writing,
migration strategies, escalated ADN support, and documentation examples for ADN customers
accessing any Acxiom product lines, whether they used Microsoft Office automation,
Smalltalk, Perl, C++, Flash, Cold Fusion, VB, Access, Transact-SQL … you name it.
Rapidly prepared various products and concepts in the Acxiom pipeline, to support
sales-support “live” demos.
Served as internal evangelist and external advocate for XML, throughout Acxiom career,
beginning with the pioneering use of XML at Acxiom through the ADN 1.x API.
Served as customer advocate for XML interfaces, helping Acxiom groups to create usable XML
APIs and schemas, receiving various peer-to-peer internal awards for this work.
Represented Acxiom to CPExchange standards group designing XML B2B interfaces for,
and concerned with privacy issues central to, the exchange of customer data.
FoxPro Developers’ Consultant, dba SoftSpoken,
based in Santa Rosa, California, USA and Auckland, New Zealand
1989-1999.
Specialist in the optimization of FoxPro development practices for programming teams in DOS, Windows, Unix, and Macintosh environments. International client list included Microsoft, Legent, SBT, Savid, various government agencies’ programming groups, and most of the major FoxPro application development houses.
Developer of several Xbase tools currently shipped as part of the Microsoft Visual FoxPro product from VFP 6.0 through present versions, including a small-scale application framework, many class libraries, and its Coverage-Profiler analysis application.
(For by-lined articles on these components, see:
Customizing Visual FoxPro Application Framework Components or
Visual FoxPro Coverage Profiler Add-Ins and Subclasses.)
Developer of MasterClass Visual FoxPro Development Framework and many other published programmers’ tools. Writer, producer, and on-screen talent for FoxPro RAD videotapes.
Author of seven books for FoxPro developers, published by Que, Hayden/Brady, and Pinnacle Press, including one of the few database books ever to make NY Times Computer Bestseller list. (For book references, search for Lisa C. Slater, on Amazon books).
Monthly columnist for DataBased Advisor for over a year. Author of countless other articles and white papers on database topics, for PC Magazine, Microsoft,
and the Cobb Group. Editor of FoxTalk, developers’ journal published by Pinnacle, for two years. Editor of Pinnacle’s Pros Talk Fox books, series I and II.
Featured speaker at almost every FoxPro conference (regional, national, or international) held 1990 through 1999. Wrote and taught numerous “private” curricula for corporate groups.
Numerous honors and achievement awards for Xbase community presence and contributions, including founding member of the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) group in 1993, continuing through 2001.
Served as Fox CompuServe Forum archivist and wizop, 1990 through 1995.
Continue to provide volunteer support for Xbase developers and Fox developers migrating to other data-handling applications (for an example, see
the earliest of many sets of VFP-XML conference session notes)
as well as volunteer on-line support for people learning to use XML and XSLT in all environments.