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43976 visitors since
September 1, 2000

Last Updated on
5 August 2005
by Hianoto Santoso

Copyright © 2002-2005
by Hianoto Santoso

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About Me


I was born in Semarang in 1972. My parents and grandma were teachers, perhaps that's why I like teaching and writing articles/books very much. I have two brothers and two sisters, and I'm the youngest in the family. BTW, I'm married to a wonderful girl named Elly Handojo in October 1998.

My interest in IT grew when I enrolled to DOS and Lotus 123 class in LPK Sentral Informatika - Semarang when I was 15 years old . I managed to make a small application for my brother in Lotus 123 macro, then I was given a scholarship in LPK IKIN to study QuickBASIC. It was a pleasure time for me, trying to develop nice programs, including rewriting my previous macro with QuickBASIC. Although I didn't have computer at home, but I managed to practise using my schools' computer lab, because I worked as a volunteer assistant there.

When I was in my final year in High School, I learned dBASE III+ programming and it was terrific! I learned something new, you know, in QuickBASIC it was quite difficult to create database applications; but in dBASE III+, it was so different, very easy! Since then, I learned continually to improve my programming techniques by reading Alan Simpson's books. After graduated from High School, I worked as a part-time programmer using dBASE III+ as the development environment, and Clipper Summer 87 as the compiler when we proceduced the final version of the applications. It was my first experience with Clipper.

In 1991, I was attracted with FoxPro 1.01 and started to migrate to it. After exploring FoxPro for some time, I found out it was not for me and Clipper 5.0 was released. I bought it and read the manual books, wow, I couldn't understand anything about the new feature of Clipper 5.0! Lucky me, I found several excellent Clipper books in the market and finally I understood a lot and I made a commitment to use Clipper 5.01 as my primary development language in 1992.

It was not easy, I rewrote all of my routines in Clipper 5 but it was fun! I found my lucky star when I enrolled to an Assembly class in Teknokom, the instructor was a well-known Assembly guru and author in Indonesia, Mr. Suyanto EA. He taught me the foundation to program in Assembly. After completing the course, I add more power in my routines by interfacing Clipper 5 with Assembly. It was the starting of db-Pro Library for Clipper 5, with more than a hundred powerful routines I used when developing applications.

After that, I studied C and C++ by reading books and started to write a new library which make my development easier and faster than ever. It was called dTBx - dbMaster TBrowse Extension, which enabled me to create applications with standard features (searching, filtering, column-resizing, DBEVAL, and a lot more), thus I didn't have to think the column size, dTBx will handle it for me :)

Now, with the ignorance of Computer Associates to Clipper, I have to rethink and explore the possibilities for development in Windows-based and Internet-based application. I have bought books and tried Visual Objects, Visual Basic, Delphi, Xbase++, Access, PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, UltimADE, etc and I think Delphi is more appropriate for me, thus I personally committed to switch to Delphi in 2000 and started the my new programming infrastructure in 2001.

Long live Clipper and Delphi!!

Honors and Activities
- Passed the Brainbench Delphi 5.0 Exam on February 27, 2001
- Passed the Brainbench Delphi 3.0 Exam on February 27, 2001
- Passed the Brainbench DOS 6.2 Exam on February 26, 2001 with Master Level
- Passed the Brainbench Excel97 Fundamental Exam on December 13, 2000 with Master Level
- Passed the Microsoft NT Workstation Exam in May 2000
- Passed the Microsoft NT Server Enterprise Exam in April 2000
- Passed the Microsoft NT Server Exam in March 2000
- Got the TOEFL score of 593 in December 1993
- Got the Best Thesis in IEU University in 1994
- Got the 2nd rank in IEU University in 1994
- Got the 3rd rank of Highest EBTANAS score in Semarang in 1990
- Got the scholarship in SMA Kristen 3 Semarang in 1990
- Got the 1st rank of Highest EBTANAS score in SMP Masehi 2 Semarang in 1987