Acknowledgments

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First and foremost, I must acknowledge DevelopMentor. For any of you who are unfamiliar with this company, DevelopMentor focuses on training and education for developers building distributed systems. DevelopMentor is made up of the brightest and most enthusiastic group of computer scientists I have ever encountered—a peer group of the highest level of technical integrity. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been part of this community for the last six years of my life. Many of the ideas, analogies, and recommendations in this book derive from a shared viewpoint and common base of knowledge that have grown out of the DevelopMentor community.

Many thanks to Mike Abercrombie, Lorrie Trussell, and everyone else who works at DevelopMentor. I am grateful for all your hard work building this rich and nourishing environment, which has given me so many opportunities. DevelopMentor has allowed me to exchange ideas with some of the industry's top researchers and to pursue my passion for cutting-edge technology.

I'd like to give a very special thanks to Don Box. I am especially indebted to Don for his guidance and advice on so many aspects of my career. His vision has been incredibly valuable in structuring the story this book tells. If it weren't for the questionable choices Don makes time after time when buying a laptop computer, I would consider him the smartest man in the software industry today.

I'd like to thank those subject experts who reviewed chapters and provided valuable feedback and constructive criticism. You have made this book considerably better and more accurate. I had lots of support from the different product groups within Microsoft. Thanks to Robert Green from the Visual Studio team for reviewing the first five chapters. Thanks to George Reilly from the IIS teams for reviewing the chapter on IIS and ASP. Thanks to Dick Dievendorff from the MSMQ team for reviewing my messaging chapter. A special thanks to Joe Long from the COM+ team for taking the time to answer countless questions I had when writing the chapters on the internals of COM+.

There were also many people at DevelopMentor who conducted valuable chapter reviews. Thanks to Bob Beauchemin and Jason Masterman for contributing their expertise in the areas of transaction processing and COM+ distributed services. Thanks to Tim Ewald for making excellent recommendations about architectural design issues and explaining how things work way down under. Thanks to Doug Tenure for giving me feedback on some of the earlier chapters on COM. Thanks to Keith Brown, Steve Rodgers, and Dan Sinclair for thoroughly reviewing my security chapter. Thanks to Aaron Skonnard for reviewing several chapters and making excellent suggestions about how to motivate and explain software development based on IIS, ASP, and XML. Thanks to my buddy Brian Randell for his research and his passionate views on the subject of component versioning. Chapter 5 is an adapted version of an article I coauthored with Brian for Microsoft Systems Journal. Don't tell anyone (especially Brian), but I think a few of the paragraphs in this chapter might even have been written by him.

DevelopMentor is a great place to work because it's full of legendary characters. Mike Woodring has rewritten the Island Hopper samples using nothing but assembly language. Calvin Caldwell once paused between steps in the ATL COM AppWizard to go out back (on his ranch) and deliver a baby calf. During an intensive week-long course, Dr. Joe Hummel led a cab ride of eager students into Hollywood in the early morning hours to provide a realistic simulation of what it's like to transmit packets across the Internet. And then there's this guy, Fred Wesley, who thinks so hard and so deep that none of us really understands a word he says. The joke about Fred is that he spends so much time contemplating and debating the theory of thought that he never gets around to the practice of thinking.

I also need to thank all my other peers at DevelopMentor including Niels Berglund, Henk de Koning, Jon Flanders, Martin Gudgin, Stuart Halloway, Justin Hoagland, Simon Horrell, Kevin Jones, Paul Kirby, John Lam, Brian Meso, Jose Mojica, Gus Molina, Brad E. Needham, Fritz Onion, Simon Perkins, Brent Rector, Dave Schmitt, George Shepherd, David Smallberg, Dan Weston, and Jason Whittington. All of you have contributed in one way or another to my overall understanding of computer science and software development.

Last but surely not least, I must give recognition to Chris Sells, the evil genius of DevelopMentor. Chris, more than any other individual, is responsible for my career direction. He's the one who ultimately led me down the path to writing about Visual Basic and COM. It was Chris's overly adequate explanations of casting away const, template specialization, and functor objects that convinced me that I would never find happiness as a C ++ programmer.

I'd like to thank everyone I have worked with at Fawcette Technical Publications. Thanks to all the hardworking people who put the VBITs conferences together, including Tena Carter, Janet Nickels, Robert Scoble, Maryam Ghaemmaghami, Jennifer Brucker, and Diamond Jim Fawcette.

Thanks to Joshua Trupin and Joseph Flanigen for publishing my articles in MSDN Magazine, Microsoft Systems Journal, and MIND. I'd also like to thank the other people at these publications who helped me get my words into print, including Joanne Steinhart, Terry Dorsey, Etna Novik, Joan Levinson, and Michael Longacre.

I would like to thank Claudette Moore and Debbie McKenna at the Moore Literary Agency for their support and assistance. Thanks especially to Claire Horne for helping me create and shop the proposal for the first edition of this book.

I am especially appreciative of all the people at Microsoft Press for helping me put this book together. This includes my acquisitions editor, Ben Ryan, and a very talented editing and production team. Many thanks to Kathleen Atkins for doing an excellent job as lead editor and project manager. Thanks, too, to Sally Stickney for her contributions editing the manuscript. I was also very lucky to have Ina Chang as the manuscript editor and Steve Perry as the technical editor. I hope to work with all of them again in the future.

Finally, I would like to thank the attorneys who work for Microsoft. In retrospect, I am very grateful that you made me spell out "Visual Basic" at every possible occasion instead of allowing me to use the friendly two-letter abbreviation that we all use when referring to our beloved development tool. You have undoubtedly added at least 10 pages to this text and you have, therefore, increased the perceived value of my book to the casual observer looking through the shelves at her local bookstore.