Acknowledgments

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When I approached my favorite publishers with the idea for the book, I only included O'Reilly because I thought a rejection email from them would look really great. I had plans to frame it and everything. The fact that I have written a book for the supreme deities of computer publishing still has me in awe. I mean, I have a book with an animal on the cover and everything. All I can do is say "Wow." So first and foremost, I would like to thank Tim O'Reilly for having the faith in me to write this book. I thought it would be a great book; he did too. They call that synergy! But ideas aside, none of this could have happened without the greatest editor in the known Universe. Of course, you all know who it is, but I'll mention his name anywayRon Petrusha. For those of you who don't know, editors are the ones who actually know how to write books and spend an awful amount of time trying to teach people like me to do the same. Ron, thank you for convincing me to write this book. I couldn't have done it without you. I think I have mastered the semicolon. Next comes the apostrophe.

I must acknowledge all my friends and family who gave me much support during the course of writing this book. But I would like to give special thanks to Kathy Duval (that's my mom!), Glen Duval, Kara Duval, Chris Mercier (Big Chris), Bill Purvis (The Purvis), and Courtney Lomelo (She Who Must Not Be Named) for being my teachers during this time.

I owe many thanks to my proofreader and technical advisor, Brett Lindsey. When something just doesn't make sense, he is really good at pointing that out. For you, I give you your own paragraph.

There are several people whom I do not know personally , but have my thanks anyway, because without them this book would not have been possible. The first is Matt Curland, the inventor of the vtable swapping trick that makes 99% of this book possible. I learned about this interesting little trick while looking through code for a context menu handler that he had written. (This code still might be available in the VB owner area on Microsoft's web site.) Needless to say, I don't think I ever would have figured that out by myself . This guy is a wicked coder ! I also need to mention all the people on the http://atl@discuss.microsoft.com listserv. These people really know COM, and sometimes they actually put up with me asking specific questions about VB and COM. When I was looking for technical reviewers, this is where I went looking. A more knowledgeable group of COM commandos does not exist.

Finally, I want to thank Daniel Creeron for his excellent , thorough technical review of the book.

With that said, it is time to explore the shell . . .

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