About

Rockford Lhotka

Apress

2004 Rockford Lhotka

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Technical Reviewer: Gavin Smyth
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For Teresa, Tim, and Marcus with love

About the Author

Rockford Lhotka is the author of numerous books, including Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects . He is a Microsoft Software Legend, a Microsoft Regional Director, a Microsoft MVP, and an INETA speaker. Rockford speaks at many conferences and user groups around the world and is a columnist for MSDN Online. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies, one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners dedicated to solving today's most challenging business problems using 100 percent Microsoft tools and technology.

About the Technical Reviewer

Gavin Smyth is a professional software engineer with more years experience in development than he cares to admit. His knowledge ranges from device drivers to multihost applications, real-time operating systems to UNIX and Windows, Assembler to C++, Ada, and C#. He has worked for clients such as Nortel, Microsoft, and BT, among others; he has written a few pieces as well for the former EXE and Wrox publishing companies, but finds criticizing other people's work much more fulfilling. Beyond that, when he's not fighting weeds in the garden, he tries to persuade LEGO robots to do what he wants them to do (it's for the kids ' benefit, honest).

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a big project and I want to thank a number of people who helped make it come to fruition.

First, I'd like to thank my wife and sons for being patient with me over the past several months. Without your love and support this would have been impossible !

I'd also like to thank Greg Frankenfield and Paul Fridman for making Magenic such an awesome place to work. The support that you and the rest of Magenic have provided has been great, and I appreciate it very much!

The Apress editorial and technical review team put in a lot of time and effort and really helped shape this book into what you see here. I owe them all a debt of gratitude for their fine work.

Finally, I'd like to thank the scores of people who've sent me emails of support, encouragement, or just plain asked when the book would be done. I hope you find this book to be as rewarding to read as it has been for me to write.

Code well and have fun!