Memmingen 2023 Speakers

 

Speaker Bio

Fabrice Foray

After a first encounter with personal computing and a Tandy TRS-80 in the early 80's, it was the use of Clipper 86 that led me to xBase languages. He has been teaching computer science in France for more than 30 years, especially with C++, Java and C# languages, and at the same time I continued the xBase adventure with CA-Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net and finally XSharp!

Stefan Hirsch Stefan Hirsch from Waldenbuch (south of Stuttgart), Germany
- Working for Kölndata Software GmbH since 2004
- Began coding in the mid of 1990’s in school, starting with Assembler, Basic and Pascal
- Used C/C++ and started C# with .Net Framework 1.0 at university
- Since 2004 main development languages are C# and CAVO 2.x
- Gave a try to Vulcan in 2008/2009, with moderate success (waste of time and money)
- Using X# since 2018
- Their main product is still a VO application with 100s of customer specific plugins. We started migration to X# in 2020 but stopped after some months because of resources. Next plan is to skip the migration to X# and instead go directly to web frontend for the whole application.

Nikos Kokkalis

Nikos Kokkalis started programming at an early age as a hobby. He studied Computer Engineering at the Democritus University of Thrace, and there also earned his doctorate. He is a freelance software developer since 1996, with periods of employment. From 1996 to 2004 he worked for Anadelta Software on business software and road construction CAD. From 2009 to 2022 he worked as an embedded software and digital signal processing engineer at Intracom Telecom. During 2011 - 2015 he was a member of the GrafX development team. Since Sept. 2015 he has been a member of the XSharp development team, mainly working on the compiler, macro compiler and database engine. Since 2023 he is a software engineer at Arista Networks.
Peter Monadjemi Peter started his professional career first as a book author in 1988 before becoming a professional developer. He already started programming in the 70s. As probably everybody at that time he used BASIC, than Assembler, later Forth and a few other languages he can't remember anymore. He regrets that he ignored VO in the 90s and instead tried to convince everybody that Visual Basic is the best invention since sliced bread. He started using X# in the late 00s when he became a member of the EurekaFach team. He is convinced that X# is the best language for developing business application for the .Net Framework. He even wrote a book about X# in 2023.
Chris Pyrgas Chris Pyrgas started programming at the age of 12, and after several years of developing small games, utilities and realtime graphics presentations (together with Nikos Kokkalis) using Basic, Pascal and assembly language, started his professional career at 20 in 1996, developing business applications in Clipper and Visual Objects, as a member of Anadelta Software in Greece.

In the early stages of the .Net Framework (v1.0), he got also involved with the CULE.Net project, in which he developed "CulEdit", the first version of the IDE that later become VIDE and now XIDE. Later he got involved with Vulcan.NET and became a member of the development team, while in the last 8 years he is a full-time member of the X# development team, working mainly on XIDE, the VOXporter, the VO-compatible binary editors, the X# runtime, quality assurance, testing and customer support.
Wolfgang Riedmann Wolfgang Riedmann is the founder of the small software house Riedmann GmbH in Meran, South Tyrol , Italy, specialized in individual software development.

After working in Cobol on a mainframe, he started to work in Clipper, and then in VO starting with the long awaited prerelease. When X# was presented, he put in production the first small applications written in this language, and today more than the half of ist work time is done in X# using XIDE.

Wolfgang wrote also some articles in the Software Development Techniques journal, and spoke also on some VO and X# conferences.

Living in Italy, but with German mother language, he also has connection in both the German and the Italian X# and VO community.

Andrej Terkaj Andrej Terkaj is a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering, coming from Slovenia.

I started my professional career in 1980 as a software project manager. In 1987, he founded a private company, where he was not only the owner, but mainly a software developer. After more than 38 active years in the development of software for the logistics and maintenance sector he closed his company in 2018 as his retirement was approaching.

He is a long-time VO and X# developer of apps for professional end users using different relational database management systems, most of them MS SQL Server.   

He has taken programming as part of his life, so now he's even more immersed in a modern programming tools. He follows and tests new technologies very keenly and he is happy to do consultancy work.

Robert van der Hulst

Robert van der Hulst (The Netherlands) has been part of the IT industry since the 80's. He started developing applications in DOS with dBase, Clipper and FoxBase, C and Assembler. Later he developed applications for Windows and .Net with C/C++, Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net, Visual FoxPro, and C#.

Robert has created several 3rd party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.Net development team, and worked there on the compiler, IDE, runtime and RDD systems.

In 2015, Robert founded the XSharp (X#) Project , together with Fabrice Foray (France), Nikos Kokkalis (Greece) and Chris Pyrgas (Greece). They were all colleagues from the former Vulcan.Net development team who decided there was a need for an open source implementation of XBase for .Net.