Microsoft

From February 1988 until April 1992, I worked for Microsoft. I started on a project code-named Omega, which eventually turned into Microsoft Access. Along the way, my first program that shipped was the database ASCII import utility in the Microsoft Basic Professional Development System.

My primary task, though, was writing the print engine in Microsoft Access 1.0. I wrote the low-level engine that rendered text onto the paper. The most visible part of my work is the "print preview" window in Access. Even today, that window is virtually unchanged from what I wrote over ten years ago.

In April of 1992, I left Microsoft and founded what became Xoc Software. The first thing I produced was a mail-merge program that allowed you to produce form letters in Microsoft Word from an Access 1.0 or 1.1 database. When Access 2.0 included this feature, it made the product obsolete.

In the Fall of 1992, I wrote three chapters of the book, Inside Microsoft Access, published by New Rider's Press.

Starting in 1993, I joined Paul Litwin and Ken Getz on my next book, the Microsoft Access 2 Developer's Handbook published by SYBEX. Our goal with this book was to start where every other book ended, and I think we succeeded in writing the best book on Access. This was followed by the Microsoft Access 95 Developer's Handbook, almost a total rewrite of the previous material.