About the Authors

Mark Schmidt is a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard. His current research is in the area of advanced custom user interfaces. Part of this work was the topic of a talk he gave at the 2001 VSLive! Conference in San Francisco. Mark has written articles on C# for Visual Studio Magazine and Visual Basic Programmer's Journal . Mark also coauthored Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ .NET in 24 Hours . At HP, Mark has used C# in many areas from quick user-interface prototypes to fully functional ASP.NET-enabled Web servers. His breadth of knowledge is the result of a constant search for information that leads him down several different technology avenues. More information about Mark Schmidt and this book appears at http://www.csharpcookbook.com and http://www.samspublishing.com.

Simon Robinson is a well-known author, specializing in .NET programming, and is editor of ASP Today, the leading ASP and ASP.NET- related Web site. Simon's first experience of commercial computer programming was in the early 1980s when his computer project at college became the college's student time-tabling program, running on the BBC Micro. Later, he studied for a PhD in physics and subsequently spent a couple of years working as a university physics researcher. A large part of this time was spent writing programs to do mathematical modeling of certain properties of superconductors. Somewhere around this time, he realized there was more money to be had in straight computer programming and ended up at Lucent Technologies doing mostly Windows COM programming, before finally becoming self-employed, combining writing and freelance software development. He has an extremely broad experience of programming on Windows. These days, his core specialism is .NET programming, and he is comfortable coding in C++, C#, VB, and IL and has skills ranging from graphics and Windows Forms to ASP.NET, directories, data access, Windows services, and the native Windows API.

Simon lives in Lancaster, UK. His outside interests include theatre, dance , performing arts, and politics. You can visit Simon's personal Web site at http://www.SimonRobinson.com.

Christian Nagel offers training and consulting with development and designing of Microsoft .NET solutions. He looks back to more than 15 years experience as a developer and software architect. Christian started his computing career with PDP 11 and VAX/VMS platforms, covering a variety of languages and platforms. Since the year 2000 he has been working with .NET and C#, developing and architecting distributed solutions. While doing this, he has also written several .NET books: among them are Professional C# , Professional .NET Network Programming , and C# Web Services . As a Microsoft Regional Director he speaks at international conferences and is the leader of INETA Europe (International .NET User Group Association). You can contact Christian via Web site http://www.christiannagel.com.