I was so excited to announce the new version of the dotnet2themax site that I forgot to introduce myself, as is customary in any weblog. On the other hand, if you have attended dotnet2themax.com in the past, odds are that you already know me, perhaps because you've read one of my books or one of my articles on programming magazines. But I will summarize my professional life here, if only to provide links to other places where you can find more interesting material.

I live and work in Bari, Italy, but I often travel to speak at conferences such as VSLive!, WinDev (US), DevWeek (UK), TechDays (Switzerland), and a few others.

I am one of the two Italian MSDN Regional Directors and in the last two years I have served as the chairman for Windows Professional Conference, the largest Italian conference for developers, and routinely speak at DevDays and other Microsoft events in Italy since 1998. I have been giving classes for Wintellect in the US until mid-2004, when I decided not to spend abroad 5 or 6 months of each year.

In 2002 I founded Code Architects, a software company that focuses on .NET and Microsoft technologies, together with Giuseppe Dimauro (the other MSDN Regional Director for Italy). Code Architects provides training and consulting services for many Italial government agencies and large companies, including Microsoft. Code Architects markets a line of programming tools that I authored (or co-authored), including CodeBox, Form Maximizer, and the award-winning VB Maximizer. The Code Architects Team include some of the most skilled .NET experts in Italy. If you can read Italian, you might find a lot of interesting stuff in our Team Blog.

I wrote about 80 articles for Visual Studio Magazine (formerly Visual Basic Programmer's Journal), with which I collaborate since 1996, and also wrote a couple of articles for MSDN Magazine and for developer's sites such as DevX. For example, you can go here to read nearly 300 tips and short articles I wrote for DevX, mostly on VB6.

I don't write only for US magazines, though. I wrote my first article back in 1983, then I wrote dozens of columns for Computer Programming, the leading Italian magazine for developers. In 1995 I founded Visual Basic and .NET Journal (formerly Visual Basic Journal), the only Italian magazine entirely devoted to .NET Framework programming.

English

Italian

While I still am the editor-in-chief of my own magazine, in recent years I decided to write fewer articles to focus on my books and my own vb2themax.com Web site, which I founded in 1999 and that a few years ago was expanded into dotnet2themax.com to match the new C# and VB.NET contents. This site is now sponsored by Code Architects, together with the Italian web sites dotnet2themax.it and ugisharepoint.it.

Microsoft Press published my first book in 1999. Since then Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6 has sold around 150,000 copies all over the world, including translations to Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish, and continues to sell more than many VB.NET books. In 2002 I wrote Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, which the next year was upgraded into Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003, a 1400-page textbook that cover virtually everything you need to know about VB.NET and the .NET Framework. It has been one of the VB.NET bestseller and as of today it nearly alwways appears in Amazon's Top Ten list for Visual Basic and .NET books. I also co-authored Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (with Jeffrey Richter) and the newer Practical Coding Guidelines and Best Practices for Visual Basic .NET and C# Developers (with Giuseppe Dimauro), a collection of over 700 rules and tips for writing robust and efficient .NET applications.

While Visual Basic is still my pet language, I write a lot of C# code as well. I am especially interested in programming techniques, algorithms, optimization, .NET internals, client-side (Windows Forms) and ADO.NET programming. I love to write addins, macros, code generators, and other tools that can make programming a more pleasant (and faster) experience, and I'll use this blog to share my findings with you all.

What else? I love music - a bit of everything, but especially jazz and fusion - and in my previous life I was even tempted to become a professional musician, until I realized that programming can be as much fun. I played my alto sax with many local combos and orchestras, but I probably reached by peak - on the fun side, at least - with Don Box's Band on the Runtime. If you are among the few millions who never listened to the Band, you can grab a video here or here. You can find some lyrics here and here.