Carl Franklin was writing professional
applications in QuickBASIC before VB, and ever since VB 1.0 he has been writing books, developing, and teaching. He was hired by Ethan Winer's company, Crescent Software,
then in West Redding, CT, just before they released their first VB product,
QuickPak Pro for Windows. Crescent and MicroHelp were the first companies to offer tools for VB programmers, and Carl was there, learning from the masters and writing good code.
Carl started writing for BasicPro magazine, and speaking at VBITS (their live VB seminar). Later on, BasicPro became Visual Basic Programmer's Journal, for which he wrote several feature articles, and was also the editor of their Q&A column for three years.
In 1994, Carl started dabbling with Internet Programming. In fact, Carl was the first
author to use the words "Visual Basic" and "Internet" in the same sentence (are
you noticing a trend of being first?). He went on to write a best selling book, Visual Basic 4.0 Internet Programming with John Wiley and Sons, and then updated it to Visual Basic 6.0 Internet Programming in 1999. You can read some of his publications at
http://carl.franklins.net/pubs.asp.
Also in 1994, Carl and the president of Apex Software, Gary Wisniewski
started Carl & Gary's Visual Basic Home Page, which became the first popular website for Visual Basic programmers on the
Internet. The site is ancient history now, but it ruled the Internet in its day.
After developing client/server systems for several companies Carl decided to venture out on his own developing web sites (such as www.sweet16.com) that rely heavily on Visual Basic, ASP, and SQL Server.
In July, 2000 Carl was asked by Microsoft to be the MSDN Regional Director for Hartford, CT. The RDs are a liason between local development communities and Microsoft. Responsibilities include hosting Microsoft DevDays (an annual event that occurs simultaneously in over 120 major cities around the world) and delivering the Keynote Presentation. He received the highest score on the Devdays Keynote in 2002 of all the RDs in the world!
Carl is now and will always be a developer, and never stops writing software that interests him. He is currently the Chair of the Visual Basic track for www.devconnections.com.