I have been interested in application development since a very early age. If anyone remembers this obscure home gaming system I'll be surprised : Aquarius (not sure of the spelling). As part of the instruction booklets came a few sample BASIC programs that created a running man or a mini pong game, etc. After spending hours typing in all of that code at 8 or 9 years old and then seeing the little green pixilated running man I was very pleased that I was able to create that using English like context in the form of a programming language. I was intrigued from there and wanted to know more. I never really had much interest in how computers worked as much as I liked to write code and solve problems. So, in 9th grade my high school offered a series of computer programming courses. I, II, III and IV. Computer Programming I had a few periods a day full of about 15 - 20 students each. They started off teaching, of all things, BASIC on an Apple 2E. I loved the class and went on to take Computer Programming II the next year. The class started off as normal as the prior year, but the next 2 years they were teaching PASCAL which is a completely different type of language and methodology. The class quickly evaporated and left me as the last man, err kid, standing. I was the only student to take II, III and IV. So, as the instructor led the students into a lab during the Computer Programming I course, I was in the lab already waiting and received a separate lesson for the next 3 years. This led me to attend the CHUBB institute right out of high school. This was 1996, so the hot topic was Y2K and CHUBB taught COBOL for 6 months, C++ for 3 month and VB4 (ew) for 3 months. Unfortunately, I went the route of being a COBOL programmer for 9 years all through the Y2K conversion BS and quickly became as bored with my profession as I was obsolete. So, I took a risk and taught myself .Net starting off in familiar territory of VB.Net because of my BASIC background and I took a job re-hosting a company's legacy mainframe COBOL systems to VB.Net/C#.Net/ASP.Net and believe it or not COBOL.Net (Fujitsu). After using VB.Net for a year or so I took up C# and instantly fell in love with the elegance and intricacy of the language. So, it was me and C# from there on out. I have been coding in C#.Net/ASP.Net and a variety of other peripheral technologies ever since and found the joy in my career again.