Acknowledgments

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This book was originally my idea, but I feel like I am just a conductor of a very well- oiled publishing machine. The people at Microsoft Press really turned my idea into what I think is a book that holds together quite well and is fairly consistent from chapter to chapter.

I'd like to thank Vicky Thulman, who acted as the Hollywood producer, balancing the need for "the talent" (that would be me) to have creative control against the real-world pressures of the publishing business. Vicky kept me informed throughout production of the book, managing the editorial process and keeping me in line.

Brian Johnson, the technical editor, was fabulous at checking all of my facts and not letting me get away with glossing over a technical issue. Brian also convinced me to register the domain names mentioned in the book. Now if you go to myduckjokes.com or duckbarjokes.com, you'll know who to blame.

Becka McKay saw the manuscripts first. I wrote this book in about a dozen hotel rooms and at least as many airplane trips over several months. Consistency suffered as a result. It was Becka's job to tell you, the reader, what I actually meant. I tend to use the words "this" and "that" a lot. Becka added a lot of comments like "author is saying 'this' again. What does he mean this time?"

The team at Microsoft Press were the best an author can have. I look forward to working with them again!

The good people at OmniMark Technologies were very supportive of this book, since it showcases their great product. Chief Technical Officer John McFadden pulled out all the stops in his organization to get me a working copy of OmniMark that had world-class handling of XML documents and schemas. As always, OmniMark Technologies makes the difficult look easy. The impossible took them a little longer. Mark Baker at OmniMark worked with my last-minute deadlines on the material for Appendix A, "OmniMark for the Impatient." I left it mostly intact, only modifying it for the duck-bar theme and adding some information appropriate to the rest of the book.

There are several people at Microsoft who helped keep me in the loop about technologies in the book. Kevin McCall, the BizTalk Evangelist, never sleeps. He jets around the world telling people about BizTalk and how they can solve their B2B problems. It was Kevin who pointed out that the BizTalk Framework spec changed radically after I had shipped chapters to the publisher. Fortunately, Vicky gave me an extension to update the book to the new draft spec. John Montgomery plays a similar role for SOAP. John filled me in on the relationship between SOAP and BizTalk. Robert Coleridge is an Architect at Microsoft working on the ROPE implementation. Robert kept me in the loop as new builds came along. There are many others at Microsoft who have been a great help, and I'd like to thank them all.

Mehtap Ozkan helped with a nasty bug in ASP that caused data in a POST method to get lost. She worked intensely to come up with the right combination of character conversion functions to find the lost data. Mehtap also provided spiritual support during the difficult last part of the writing process.

John Iobst from the Newspaper Association of America was helpful in sorting through the history and politics of what his organization is doing with XML and standard schemas for sharing news content.

I have taught thousands of students over the past couple of years about XML and e-commerce applications. These lectures and seminars allow me to test new material and see what works and what doesn't. My students' feedback is what made the information in this book possible, and it gave me plenty of duck-bar jokes.

And I thank you for buying this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.