Holger

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 Fabrice 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 he continued the xBase adventure with CA-Visual Objects, Vulcan.Net and finally XSharp!

   

Nikos Kokkalis

Nikos Kokkalis started programming at an early age as a hobby. He studied Computer Engineering at the Demo-critus University of Thrace, where he also earned his doctorate. He has been a freelance software developer since 1996, with periods of employment in between. 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. From 2011 to 2015, Nikos was also a member of the GrafX development team. Since September 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. Like probably everybody at that time, he used BASIC, then 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 real-time graphics presentations (together with Nikos Kokkalis) using Basic, Pascal and assembly language, Chris 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), Chris also got involved with the CULE.Net project, in which he developed "CulEdit", the first version of the IDE that later became VIDE and is now XIDE. Later, he got involved with Vulcan.NET and became a member of the development team. In the last 8 years, Chris has been 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 the first small applications written in this language in production, and today, more than the half of its work time is done in X# using XIDE. Wolfgang also wrote some articles in the Software Development Techniques journal, and spoke on some previous VO and X# conferences.
Living in Italy, but with German as his native language, Wolfgang has connection in both the German and the Italian X# and VO community.
   
Holger Steinmair Holger Steinmair was born and raised in South Tyrol, Italy. He is a German native speaker as he is part of a linguistic minority in Italy. He studied at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in South Tyrol and has been working as a software developer at Infominds, a software company from South Tyrol that develops ERP programmes and mobile applications, since 2013.
The development was initially in Visual Objects and since 2021 the migration to XSharp has been completed.
He now leads one of the development teams and is always in favour of innovation and further development.
   

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 third-party components for Visual Objects and Vulcan developers and has been part of the Visual Objects and Vulcan.Net development team, where he worked 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 col-leagues from the former Vulcan.Net development team who decided there was a need for an open-source implementation of XBase for .Net.