Acknowledgments

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First and foremost, I'd like to thank my mother and father for their constant support and patience.

I've been fortunate to have so many people point me in the right direction at exactly the right time, allowing me to take advantage of many opportunities throughout my programming career. As a first-time author, it's my duty to thank too many people, though I'm sure I'll unintentionally leave out some.

I'd like to thank Mary Sceppa and Hollis Graves for their encouragement and advice as well as for the computers I used throughout college. Thanks to Robert Welling for taking a chance and letting a scared little kid run his billing system. I'd also like to thank my extended family in the Seattle area, the Bramans, for helping me feel more at home out here.

Thanks to all the teachers, administrators, and professors who helped guide me through high school and college—especially James Pender, Judith Bolles, Tom Brown, Linda Mahler, and Robert Gunning.

So many people at Microsoft have helped me during the past few years in both technical and nontechnical situations. I'd like to thank Clay Stephens for getting my foot wedged firmly in the door and for getting me inside Microsoft. Thanks to my mentors, Greg Hinkel, Troy Cambra, and Jon Fowler. I must thank Bill Vaughn for the foreword of this book but primarily because Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server [Microsoft Press, 1998] was my bible when I started in Microsoft Visual Basic database support. Thanks to Dave Stearns for some of the clearest answers to questions about Remote Data Objects (RDO) and the ODBC API. I hope this book will be as enlightening as the volumes of mail he's sent me. Thanks to Jim Lewallen and Greg Smith of the Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) development team for answering so many questions about the goals and uses of specific features. I'd also like to thank Don Willits for helping me get this concept off the ground, Eric Schmidt for helping to put me in touch with so many people on the development team, and Sam Carpenter for keeping me (relatively) sane while I wrote this book.

Last of all, thanks to Mary Barnard, Alice Turner, Jean Ross, and the rest of the editing team for putting up with a first-time author. I'm sure you had no idea how much work you were signing up for.