Mat Fergusson started his journey into software development in 1998 by studying software engineering at Sheffield University. After graduating, Mat took to working in IT infrastructure, quickly progressing from desktop support to infrastructure implementation and management.
Armed with real-world experience of supporting users and seeing how applications and infrastructure are actually used, Mat began moving back into full-time application development, building classic ASP applications at the tail end of the .com boom.
Mat was among the very early adopters of Microsoft's next generation development platform, .NET. Over the next few years, Mat would develop numerous web applications and integration projects using VB.NET and later C#, and in 2005, he started developing mobile business applications built on the Windows CE platform years before the iPhone made mobile applications ubiquitous.
After completing the first release of an award-winning hosted health and safety mobile application, Mat decided to gain some broader experience and embarked on a one and a half year world tour, which saw him broadening both his IT and life skills by working for the Enterprise Applications division of HP in New Zealand and becoming a certified dive master in Thailand.
Returning to the UK, Mat teamed up with his old colleagues and between them, they founded Binary Consultants, where he continues to work today. In the last 6 years, Mat has continued to refine his .NET development skills in his role as .NET Lead at Binary, and has been responsible for several highly specialist web applications for the cosmetic industry in Russia and the rapidly growing online gaming industry in Malta.
In the last 2 years, Mat has started cross training in AX development, an experience that has helped him directly in writing this book with Simon. Mat's current specialty however, is the development of .NET applications for Binary's clients that extend the capabilities of AX by interfacing with the WCF services exposed by the AIF, introducing rich visualization and interactions that simply aren't possible with the AX client.
