This is often the starting-point for database applications. COT generates a fully-functioning web database maintenance application which can be customised to manage a customer's business. COT does all the "heavy-lifting": managing data editing, record creation and deletion, update concurrency issues and browser compatibility.

Altova Developer Tools is a toolkit of development aids for programmers who use XML.

I have the Professional Edition which comprises:

• XML Spy: XML development environment.
• MapForce: a visual data mapping and data integration tool.
• StyleVision: a stylesheet and report designer for XML and databases.
• UModel: UML tool for software modeling and application development.
• DiffDog: difference/merge tool for files, directories, and databases.
• DatabaseSpy: a multi-database query, design, and comparison tool.
• Schema Agent: a visual tool for managing XML-based file relationships.
• Authentic: an electronic forms editor for XML and databases.

I would suggest that RedGate Developer Suite a toolkit of development aids for programmers who use Microsoft SQL. A "Swiss army knife" collection of utilities that really does aid productivity.

Microsoft Developer Network Professional Edition. This gives me access to the latest (and pre-release) versions of Visual Studio Professional and all of the Operating Systems, Microsoft Office and SQL Server versions.

A flexible and fully-featured web component that permits users to generate their own crosstabulation reports on a web page by using a drag-and-drop interface. It enables customers to create highly sophisticated data analysis "on the fly" that can be downloaded into an Excel spreasheet for further analysis or incorporation into a presentation or report.

A web-based reporting system that allows onscreen display of reports and downloading of the same as PDF documents.

This component allows the display of spreadsheets on web pages. It has the ability to behave as a typical spreadsheet, allowing the user to input values and formulae. It also supports many of the funtions that are part of Excel and can display charts and graphs.

Infragistics is an extensive library of web development components. I have the Ultimate edition on annual renewal.

This is my programming language of choice for current developments. C# is a modern and efficient language that creates compact and fast applications. It integrates well with Microsoft Visual Studio - not surprising given that the language was first developed by Microsoft in 2000. C# version 6.0 was released in July 2015.

Excel is a standard component in Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite and most people know how to make a simple spreadsheet. I have given courses in Advanced Excel for engineers and marketing executives and in so doing have travelled some of the more abstruse areas of the product. This includes some of the more complex statistical analyses of raw data as well as many handy shortcuts and useful ruses and strategems.

I have given Access training courses and I am very familiar with all versions of MS Access from Access2 (1994) onwards (Access95, Access2000, Access2002, Access2003, Access2007. and fleetingly, Access2010). Access is now the "Cindarella" product within the Office Suite; Microsoft have stated that they want customers and developers to move to more rubust solutions using SQL Server.

Nonetheless, MS Access remains a powerful prototyping tool - very useful for knocking up quick demonstrations and also as a means of transferring data from sundry database formats.

Visual Basic for Applications is an implementation of BASIC that runs within the MiIcrosoft Office suite. Macros (small program snippets) written in VBA can access the full functionality of the Office suite. Macros written in one office program can execute other office programs as slaves. For one client I used this technique to generate lengthy and complex documents in Word that were created by a Microsoft Access application that was, in turn, pulling data from a Microsoft SQL database. The general term for this is MS Office Automation.

Delphi (a modern version of Pascal) was used for a number of projects that I implemented for Philips Lighting in the 1990s.

When I migrated CAIRO away from Microsoft Access, the entire front-end was written in Delphi.

Fortran was the favoured language of the scientific community in the 60s..90s. Our version of MIT STRESS was coded in Fortran as were most of the extensions and accessory applications such as WaveFront, SteelCheck, Depict, Select and Envelope.

I learned IBM 360 assembly language when at Durham University. For commercial work I used Intel 8080/Z80 assembly language in the early 1980s when optimising the STRESS3 structural analysis program for use on micro computers running under CP/M and MSDOS. STRESS was written in Fortran and I discovered that using any of the built-in Fortran input/output statements invoved loading an unweildy memory-hog of an library.

So I wrote my own input/output library in assembly language. It was so compact and fast that with the help of my brother Brian Shearing we were able to introduce a virtual memory system that would take advantage of available memory to cache data in RAM, only writing it to disk when strictly necessary; it's one of the things what made our version of STRESS so fast. The competition simply couldn't believe how quick our version was - they thought it must be some kind of voodoo.

Other optimisations for STRESS included writing a library of assembly-language matrix handling routines. These interfaced with the 8087 math chip, if present. Back then, the 8087 "math chip" was a cost-option and most PC's didn't have hardware-assisted trancendental mathematic functions. This too helped make STRESS blindingly fast.

I used Real-Time Language/2 early in my career to develop monitoring and control systems for Westinghouse Brake and Signal. It was an advanced language in its day that allowed guaranteed performance for time-critical processes.

Modula-2 is a brilliant and elegant language developed by Niclaus Wirth as the sucessor to Pascal and Modula. I used it for the British Airways Freight-Packer project.