James M. Curran(Resume as MSWord file)

Summary

Experienced developer with familiarity in front end, back end and middle tier design for desktop and web applications, with special skill in writing and refactoring code for greater efficiency and maintainability.

Work experience

Oct 2011 - Present	Tallan, Inc. 62 West 45th Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10036 Tallan designs and builds custom IT solutions; helping organizations in a wide range of industries make the most of their technology investments. For a client, designed and implemented an application analyzing product sales promotions in C# and Silverlight.
Dec 2010 - Sept 2011	Connectivity Data Systems 37th St New York, NY A full-time position at a start-up (still in Stealth mode) Designed and implemented Enterprise wide data access layer Direct involvement with WinForms, Web Services, Console application, MS SQL Refactored existing code libraries for performance optimization. Skills: WinForms, LINQ, XLINQ, XML, Multi-Threading, Custom Serialization, WCF, C# Generics, C# Extension methods, Visual Studio, SubVersion, Anhk
June 2010 - Dec 2010	CitiGroup Greenwich St New York, NY A 6 month contract position building a multi-platform bond trading application Direct involvement with WCF & WPF.
June 2009 - June 2010	Thomson-Reuters 3 Times Square New York, NY 10036 An open-ended contract position building a multi-platform bond trading application to bring together real-time bond information from many different sources to provide the best-informed trading environment. Direct involvement with WinForms, WebForms, Web Services, Console application, Windows Services. Refactored existing code libraries for performance optimization. Skills: WinForms, WebForms/ASP.NET, LINQ, XLINQ, XML, HTML, Multi-Threading, Custom Threadpool, Named Pipes, Custom Serialization, WCF, C# Generics, C# Extension methods, Visual Studio, Visual SourceSafe, SubVersion, Anhk
March 2008 - March 2009	Barnes & Noble.Com 76 9th Ave New York, NY 10011 Senior Programmer/Analyst Designed and implemented key portions of the online retailer's new "My B&N" website feature. Skills:  C#, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Web Services, CruiseControl.Net, Visual Studio 2005, Visual SourceSafe.
April 2007- Feb  2008	FirstPaper, LLC (now known as Skiff, LLC) 1790 Broadway, 18th Floor New York, NY 10019 C# Consulant Contract position for an e-reading and advertising start-up company funded by Hearst Interactive Media. Wrote background Windows services to read RSS feeds, sanitize data, store and repackage articles. Skills: LINQ, XLINQ, DLINQ, SQL Server, RSS, XML, HTML, Remoting, Regex, C# Generics, C# Extension methods, COM Interop, XPath, Sockets, Visual Studio 2008, Subversion CrusieControl.Net, nAnt, PowerShell, .Net 3.5, WCF
Sept 2006 - April 2007	Raritan Computer 400 Cottontail Ln Somerset, NJ 08873 C++ Consulant Six month contract to maintain their C++/MFC application connection users to remote PCs via Raritan's suite of KVM over IP products. Skills: C++, MFC, Sockets, TCP/IP, XML, Visual Studio, CVS
Nov 2003 - July 2006	Partsearch Technologies 250 Park Ave South, 10th Flr. New York, NY 10003 Senior Programmer/Analyst Designed and implemented a system for on-store & online e-commerce sales including multiple search paths and fraud detection, in ASP.NET/C# using MS SQL Server. Designed and implemented a system for creating invoices for retailers, is C#/WinForms. Maintained website for online e-commerce sales including fraud detection in ASP/VBScript. Refactored system to increase speed, OO design, and maintainability. A lead designer/implementer of a complete rewrite of the system to prepare for large-scale growth in the coming years, including low-level data access, middle tier business logic, back end data processing  and user-facing website. Wrote code generation templates to handle create to data-access layer and UI layer. Spearheaded project to transform internal design documents from flat text to XML, for more efficient and robust usage for code generation, error checking, and documentation. Skills:  .Net (v1.1), C#,WinForms, WebForms, ASP.NET XML, XPath, XSL, Custom WebControls, MS Sql Server, T-SQL, MyGeneration
Nov 1997 - Present	NJTheater.Com 18 John St, Bloomfield, NJ 07003 Owner/Director/Webmaster Design, implementation, and maintenance of a website for the promotion of theater companies in New Jersey.  Implemented a full three-tiered systems, offering information including the titles, descriptions, playwrights,  performance dates, theater locations, casts and actor biographies of stage production in NJ, using a Microsoft SQL Server database, IIS5, ASP, server-side VBScript. Presently designing & implementing conversion to ASP.NET / C# implementing the Model-View-Presenter and Inversion of Control patterns using Castle Monorail (prototype running at njtheater.org) This website, which I run in my spare time as a hobby, allows me to experiment with new technologies Skills: .Net (v1.1, v2.0, v3.5), C#, Generics, WebForms, ASP.NET XML, XPath, XSL, Custom WebControls, MS Sql Server, T-SQL, Castle Monorail, Castle Windsor IoC, DLINQ. MVP
May 2002 - Nov 2003	Aurora Software, Inc. 2 Rector Street. New York, NY 10006 Senior Programmer/Analyst Maintain a  suite of trading solutions for multiple fixed-income trading desks. Refactored large amounts of redundant code for more compact, efficient and maintainable design. Added UI features for a better user experience. Skills: Visual C++, MFC, STL, Rogue Wave, SQL Server, Sybase, ODBC, ActiveX/COM
Aug 1999 - Dec 2001	e-Commerce Solutions 2187 Atlantic Avenue Stamford, CT 06902 Senior Programmer/Analyst Designed and maintained several systems for integrating and managing online retail solutions for portals and destination sites. Used http cookies to track users through portal to any of over a hundred merchant sites, recording information in a database (SQL Server and Oracle). Wrote process to schedule, select, cache and display rotating ads on web pages. Designed a multithreaded system to handle an asynchronous write-behind cache for database updates. Designed and partial coded system for a (later cancelled) project, to allow a client web servers to read XML data from ECS server, and format into HTML locally using XSL. Wrote ISAPI filters using Visual C++, MFC, STL, IIS, ASP, ATL, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL Server and Oracle. Our flagship website is www.brandsforless.com Skills: Visual C++, MFC, STL, IIS, ASP, ATL, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL Server and Oracle, ISAPI, XML, XSL
Aug 1996 - Aug 1999	Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, 633 3rd Ave. New York, NY 10017 Programmer/Analyst, Senior Designed and maintained several systems for accessing the hospital's FileNet optical document storage system, in C++ for Windows 3.1 & Windows 95, using Microsoft Visual C++/MFC and Oracle SQL Server. Designed and proposed a system to replace storage of document images with XML documents, to improve security, reliability, display flexibility (using XSL), editablity, ease of use, and expandability. (Parts of the proposal were used by author Lisa Rein of finetuning.com in her forthcoming XML book.) Created COM and DCOM servers using ATL. Used OLE to interface with Microsoft Word. Designed and maintained Intranet application used to investigate and diagnose production problems, using IIS4, ASP, ADO, ODBC, Oracle, server-side VBScript and client-side JavaScript. Skills: Visual C++, MFC, ATL, Oracle, IIS, ASP, VBScript, JavaScript
Feb 1996 - Aug 1996	CCH, International, 30 Commerce Rd Cedar Grove, NJ 07009 Senior Programmer/Analyst Designed and programmed projects in HTML and C++ for the company's intranet, using the ISAPI interface of Microsoft's Internet Information Server for Windows NT. Skills: Visual C++, MFC, IIS, ISAPI
Nov 1992 -Feb 1996	Dendrite, International, 1200 Mount Kemble Avenue Morristown, NJ 07960 Senior Programmer/Analyst Designed and maintained an MS Windows based territorial management program for the pharmaceutical industry, in C/SDK and PowerBuilder. It records drug sales reps daily calls in an SQL database on a laptop, then dials into a host computer to upload those & download others’ updates.  Scaled system to transparently use, as the standard database either a local Watcom database or a shared remote Oracle database.  Involved in research projects concerning converting the project to C++/MFC, and converting the host system from UNIX to Windows NT on a DEC Alpha. Maintained code which had to be compatible among DOS, Windows & UNIX.
Apr 1991 -Nov 1992	Insurance Services Office, 2 Blue Hill Plaza Pearl River, NY 10960 Programmer/Analyst Designed and Coded PC projects in C for DOS using C-Scape & B-Tree.
Jan 1985 - Apr 1991	Ticketron,LP, 411 Hackensack Avenue Hackensack, NJ 07601 Senior Programmer Responsible for design and maintenance for on-line, real- time terminal systems, in PC-based system, and in Z-8000- based imbedded systems, working in several different Assemblers and 'C'. Also involved in development of database management system, in Clipper.

Publications

• "Writing Text to a Printer with LPrintWriter"  CodeProject.com June 2006
• "Locate SQL Server instances on the local network", CodeProject.com Nov 2005
• "Access Raw Data with Performance Counters in Visual C++ ", DevX.com, Aug 2002 (posted here)
• "Implement A Circular Iterator", Visual C++ Developers Journal, June 2000, pg. 64
• "A Class For Reading Version Information" Windows Developers' Journal, July 1999
• "A Word Iterator" The C/C++ User's Journal, Aug 1998, Pg 82. (posted here).
   This was cited as the primary source for the article "A Generic Iterator for Strings" by David Lorde, in The C/C++ User's Journal, Apr 1999, pg 65.
• "A Dialog Units Conversion Class" Windows Developers' Journal, Feb 1998, pg. 51 (It was featured on the cover; posted here)
• "Object- Oriented Programming in C", Computer Language Magazine (Purchased; publication was delayed indefinitely)
• Several technical articles in the "Clipper Club Newsletter"  (also technical editor)
• "Variable Dump" CLOAD, January 1982
• "Simplified Base Conversion" BYTE, November 1980

Concurrent Positions:

• Member, Board of Directors, 12 Miles West Theatre Company, Bloomfield, NJ
• Member ANSI/ISO C++ Standardization Committee. (2000-2002)
• Object Developers Group - Member of the Board of Adviser of the ODG, which presents seminars on high technology topics at varies site in NYC. Speakers have included Bjarne Stroustrap, Ivar Jacobson, John Vlissedes, Joe Celko, Stephen Clamage, and Andrew Koenig. http://www.ObjDev.Org (1996-2000)
• Beta Test Site - I was a member of the Beta test programs for Windows 95 (including the "Build of the Week" program) plus all subsequent releases including "Memphis"; Microsoft Visual C++ vers 2.1 through 6.0; Visual Basic 4.0 & 5.0; and Visual SourceSafe 4.0 & 5.0.
• Shareware Programmer - Wrote several varied MS-Windows programs which include:
  • MrMind & Lucas’s Puzzle - now under contract for retail distribution by WinSoft, Inc.
  • IconDLL - Recommended in PC Magazine (Dec. 90).
  • Galloping Horse - Included with the book "Windows Magic Tricks" by Judd Robbins (Sybex, 1992).
  • WavConv - now under contract for bundling with several retail hardware & software products.
  • FolderSize - a Windows 95 shell extension for Explorer.
  • FontPicker - A quickie utility I wrote in about 3 hr in the middle of the night, in Visual C++/MFC
• Several of those were included by Brian Livingston & David Straub with their book "Windows 95 Secrets," 
• All are available on my downloads page.

Awards received

Presented by Microsoft with their Most Valuable Professional award for technical contributions on their Internet newsgroup  support forums, predominantly for giving expert answers to questions on C and C++ programming techniques. With the restructuring of the program in 1995, I was made a "Member Level- MVP," the highest level of the honor.  I have been recognized with the award every year since 1994 to 2004.  (For more on the MVP program, click here)

Education

• MA Montclair State University Computer Science (1993)
• BS Montclair State College Computer Science (1984)

Copyright © 1997-2011 James M. Curran . All rights reserved.
Revised:July 11, 2011.