Acknowledgments

Many people behind the scenes at Manning Publications helped publish this book. A special thanks to Mike Stephens for having the initial vision to get this project started, and to Kevin Harreld for keeping me moving in the right direction. Thank you to publisher Marjan Bace and everyone on the editorial and production teams. My thanks to the technical peer reviewers led by Aleksandar Dragosavljević—Al Pezewski, Andrea Cosentino, Bhaskar V. Karambelkar, Dave Corun, Frank Quintana, Jean-Sebastien Gervais, Joe Justesen, Marco Salafia, Michael Bright, Mike Jensen, Nikander and Margriet Bruggeman, Peter Kreyenhop, Rob Loranger, Robert Walsh, Roman Levchenko, Sushil Sharma, Sven Stumpf, and Thilo Käsemann—and the forum contributors. And finally, on the technical side, thanks to Mike Shepard, who served as the book’s technical editor; and Karsten Strøbaek, who served as the book’s technical proofreader.

I don’t believe in luck or chance; rather, I think you should take an opportunity when it’s presented to you. Many thanks to David Tolkov and Tim Teebken, who gave me opportunities to develop into someone capable of writing this book. This was an after-hours project outside of my Microsoft day job, but thanks to Jean-Paul Connock for his support. Go Blues!

Thanks to Rick Claus for supporting the need for strong technical documentation in Azure, and to Marsh Macy and Neil Peterson for their personal support and guidance in writing this book. Maybe now I’ll have time to work on that school bus.