Thearon Willis is a senior consultant with over 25 years of programming experience. He started writing applications using the Basic language in 1980 and later moved on to Visual Basic and finally to Visual Basic .NET. He began working with databases in 1987 and has been hooked on writing database applications every since. He has experience with SQL Server, Oracle, and DB2 but works with SQL Server on a daily basis. Thearon has programmed in several other languages, some of which include C++, Assembler, Pascal, and COBOL. However, he enjoys Visual Basic .NET the best, as it provides the features needed to quickly build Windows and Web applications as well as components and Web Services. He currently develops intranet applications, Web Services, and server-side and client-side utilities using Visual Basic .NET. Most of these applications and utilities are database-driven and make use of XML and XSL.