Acknowledgments
| Although this book is already dedicated to my family, I'd also like to acknowledge them here. I work from my home, but in completing the book I often had to spend a great deal of extra time at the end to get the thing out the door. My wife, Melissa, was enormously understanding when I had a deadline and gave me the space I needed to meet it. Also, I tend to leave my office door open because I like my family, and often my boys, John and Tom, will come in to talk to me about their day. Even though they're only nine and seven, respectively, they're uncharacteristically understanding when it comes to letting me focus on my work for "just another five minutes" (although woe is me if I overpromise and underdeliver to those two, I'll tell you). In the family category, I'd also like to thank Beth and Joel Howie, my sister and brother-in-law, for giving me even more space and taking their nephews when the boys were tired of hearing me say "just another five minutes." Of course, I need to thank my parents, who made me a voracious reader and passed along the writing skills I never even knew they had 'til very recently. Although my family gave me the space to write this book, it would not be what it is without the efforts of some other very helpful folks. Michael Weinhardt was my co-author for the two-part MSDN Magazine series "Building Windows Forms Controls and Components with Rich Design-Time Features," which was the predecessor to Chapter 9: Design-Time Integration. He also contributed some of the best figures in this book, including the resource resolution figures in Chapter 10: Resources. Similarly, Shawn "The ADO Guy" Wildermuth helped me a great deal not only with the two database chapters but also with Chapter 8: Controls and Appendix D: Standard WinForms Components and Controls. The book would not have been the same without you two, Mike and Shawn. In addition, Mike Woodring gave me great feedback on the threading portions of this book. Keith Brown has always been the wind beneath my security wings, giving me tons of guidance on how .NET security really works (and why). Fritz Onion gave me great feedback when this book started as a five-day training course, as did Ian Griffiths. And, lucky for me, I caught Allan Cooper just as he was getting interested in programming again. He read each chapter threatening to stop when he got bored. He gave me fabulous feedback that really left a mark (particularly on the resources chapter). I'd also like to thank a few guys that didn't know they were helping me with my book, including Ljubomir Spasovski for "Help Authoring in .NET" on dotnetjunkies.com, Bob Powell for the DrawRoundRect method on dotnet247.com, and Joseph Newcomer for his multi-instance article on flounder.com. In this same category, I'd like to thank Jeff Prosise for inspiring this book with the single WinForms chapter in his book Programming Microsoft .NET . That one chapter drove me to write this book because I couldn't stand the idea of WinForms summarized in a single chapter. I'd also like to thank Don Box for letting me tag along on his book Essential .NET . I didn't write a word of it, but my close involvement with it taught me tons about how .NET really works. That education makes its way into this book. This book's reviewers deserve special thanks: Bill Woodruff, Brian Graf, Christophe Nasarre, Cristof Falk, Doug Reilly, Fumiaki Yoshimatsu, Johan Ericsson, Mark Rideout, Martin Heller, Pierre Nallet, Richard Blewett, Scott Densmore, Serge Shimanovsky, Suresh Jambu, Tim Tabor, and Zeeshan Amjad. The comments of all my reviewers had a huge impact on the book, and I can't tell you how important you all were to me. I'd especially like to single out Bill, Christophe, Mark, and Martin as being extra thorough, and Christophe (again) for being there after I'd applied reviewer comments to make sure everything still made sense. I can't tell you how much embarrassment you guys saved me. Thanks! Of course, I have to thank the guys at Microsoft who helped invent this technology and then were there to help the community (and me specifically ) in understanding it: Mark Boulter, Chris Anderson, and Jamie Cool. I'd like to thank MSDN Magazine , MSDN Online , and Windows Developer magazine for allowing me to reuse material from articles that they originally published (as listed in the Bibliography). I'd also like to thank my readers, whose feedback on those initial pieces helped shape the final version of this content, as well as inspiring me to dig even deeper than I had initially. Last but not least, I'd like to thank the fine folks at Addison-Wesley. In increasingly tight times, they still manage to provide me an environment where I can write what I think best. Special thanks go to Betsy Hardinger: copy editor, frustrated- fiction -author, kindred spirit, and hyphen mentor. In addition to turning my prose into English, she also managed to catch technical inconsistencies that hardcore developers missed. Thanks, Betsy! These folks, along with a bunch I'm sure I'm missing, have helped shape everything good that comes through in this book. The errors that remain are mine. Chris Sells |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 136