Interest at Microsoft

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As we developed this report, we were strongly supported by friends at Microsoft in Redmond. Here are a few of the ways they helped us:

• Microsoft had already published a couple of our white papers on the subject of scalable Windows applications. The feedback from developers around the world to these articles made us understand that there was a worldwide interest in design patterns, abstracted solutions for recurring programming problems, for MTS development, which encouraged us to take the time to write an extensive report and include supporting software.
• Scott Swanson, then in the Visual Basic group, arranged a meeting with almost every Program Manager working on the design of what was to become Visual Basic 6.0 and ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) 2.0. These guys gave us some important advance information about the upcoming version of ADO, strongly recommending that we leave Remote Data Objects (RDO) behind. We took their advice and modified the design patterns, the report, and all the code.
• James Utzschneider, at the time responsible for Microsoft Transaction Server, praised our design ideas and said—as we understood him—that they exactly matched his opinion of an ideal design to make the most of Transaction Server. He also gave us the opportunity to demonstrate our design to several hundred attendees at the SQL Server 7.0 Workshop in Los Angeles in February 1998, sharing the stage with him in his session called "Building Windows DNA Applications for SQL Server 7.0." The feedback we received from James and from attendees during the rest of the workshop made us act on our feeling that we should translate the report, and so we produced an English version as well as the Swedish one.

In fact, it was James who first gave us the idea that Microsoft Press might be interested in our material. At the time, we didn't feel it was ready for publication at Microsoft Press, but the thought remained in the back of our minds.