Venelina Jordanova

I still remember how I felt in 1986, when I needed to memorize and enter a 32 bit binary number indicating the start address of a tape for loading the operating system of ES1020 (IBM 360). This happened during my school time at the Mathematical High-School. It was a real challenge, because I had my summer practice in the regional branch of the Bulgarian National Bank and no mistakes were allowed. That experience taught me that the computer strictly executes commands that humans give, but it cannot read our thoughts. My first programming language was Basic and later in high-school I learned Fortran, too. I also remember that first time when I came into the computer hall the system administrator said – "Come closer to the terminal. The Computer is much bigger than you, but it will not bite you." Since that moment I always try to prove that there is no computer which is able to bite me.

In Varna Technical University, where I studied Computer Sciences, having highest grades, I received a scholarship from a Bulgarian military company. That allowed me during summers to work for them, making programs in Assembler and C. This work helped me later to make my Master degree.

After my graduation I was invited to participate in the development of the Employment Agency information system in Varna. We made a team from different types of specialists, which aimed toward planning and programming an automated information system for all activities of the agency.

The work began with the discussion about a programming language that will be used for development. We were hesitating between Pascal and C++ and then suddenly a colleague recommended us to use FoxPro. After the first few days working with FoxPro, I fell in love with this language which still continues nowadays.

In the following years my career was tied again to the Varna Technical University as a teacher. In 1997 I decided to devote my efforts and knowledge to my own company JEI. In 1999 I became an MCP and in 2001 my company became a Microsoft Certified Partner.

In my list of projects are wide ranges of various applications like banking, insurance and financial operations, petrol station POS software, postal address validation, an ERP system for the Bulgarian market, billing systems for utility companies, a report generating tool and many other tools for VFP. Since the beginning of 2003 I am the team leader for the further Visual Extend framework development.

Along with VFP projects, I’m also an architect and project leader for many .Net desktop and ASP.Net projects.

In 2003 I got the chance to be speaker at the Visual FoxPro DevCon in Frankfurt. Since that year I have been a regular speaker there. I have also held sessions at numerous regional events in Bulgaria, conferences in Bucharest, Bunnik and Paris, as well as many years at the VFP DevCon in Prague.

Since 2008, I am working together with Uwe Habermann as manager of V&U Ltd. In addition to the development of Visual Extend, our focus is the development of various Visual FoxPro applications. Further, we focus on the rich capabilities of Silverlight. We hope to be able to provide a high technology base for future projects of VFP developers, and especially VFX developers.

Sessions:

Migration of VFP Applications to Silverlight (post-conference)
More Features and Silverlight Desktop Applications (post-conference)
Silverlight for Desktop Applications