Acknowledgments

We can’t begin to count all the individuals who contributed to this book, each one helping to improve the final product. All of them deserve a warm thank-you. While we can’t name everyone here, we would like to offer special thanks to the following individuals who were particularly helpful:

Sebastian Stirling, our developmental editor at Manning—Sebastian worked with us from the beginning and masterfully transformed a bunch of words and images into an appealing book. Thank you.

Elisa Flasko, Program Manager of the Entity Framework team at Microsoft—Elisa provided valuable information and routed our questions to the right person when she didn’t have the answers. Without her, this book wouldn’t be so thorough. Thank you.

Noam Ben-Ami, Program Manager of the Entity Framework team at Microsoft—Noam pointed us to the right solutions to many problems, and was especially helpful when we were writing chapter 13. He also wrote the foreword to our book. Thank you.

Alessandro Gallo, an ASP Insider, consultant, and lead author of Manning’s ASP.NET Ajax in Action—Alessandro didn’t contribute to the content of this book, but he was the spark that started everything. Thank you.

Many individuals at Manning worked hard to make this book possible. First of all, special thanks to Michael Stephens and Marjan Bace for believing in us. Others who contributed are Karen Tegtmeyer, Mary Piergies, Maureen Spencer, Andy Carroll, Dottie Marsico, Tiffany Taylor, Susan Harkins, Janet Vail, and Cynthia Kane.

Our reviewers deserve special mention—their suggestions were invaluable. We thank Jonas Bandi, David Barkol, Timothy Binkley-Jones, Margriet Bruggeman, Nikander Bruggeman, Gustavo Cavalcanti, Dave Corun, Freedom Dumlao, Rob Eisenberg, Marc Gravell, Berndt Hamboeck, Jason Jung, Lester Lobo, Darren Neimke,

Braj Panda, Christian Siegers, Andrew Seimer, Alex Thissen, Dennis van der Stelt, and Frank Wang. We’d also like to thank Deepak Vohra, our technical proofreader, for the outstanding job he did reviewing the final manuscript during production.

Last, but not least, thank you, dear reader, for your trust in our book. We hope that it will help you in your everyday job and will encourage you to fall in love with the world of O/RMs.

In addition to the people we’ve already mentioned, there are others who are important in our lives. Even if they didn’t contribute to the book, they contributed to keeping us on track during the writing process. We acknowledge them below.

Stefano Mostarda

I’d like to thank my wife Sara for her support and patience, as well as my family (yes, the book is finally done!). Special thanks to my closest friends (in alphabetical order): Federico, Gabriele, Gianni, and Riccardo. Of course, I can’t help mentioning Filippo, who already bought a copy of the book. And a big thank-you to William and Annalisa for their friendship and invaluable support.

My last words are for Marco and Daniele: thank you, guys!

Marco De Sanctis

My thanks to Stefano and Daniele. It was a privilege to work with such smart and funny guys. And thanks to the whole ASPItalia.com team. I’m proud to be a part of it.

Special thanks to my family, and to Barbara, for their support and their patience. You have all my love.

Daniele Bochicchio

I would like to thank my wife Noemi for her support and patience, and for giving me our beautiful sons, Alessio and Matteo. A big thank-you to my parents for letting me play with computers when I was a kid, and to my family for supporting me.

A special thank-you to Stefano for the opportunity to help with this book. And thanks to both Stefano and Marco for sharing their passion for Entity Framework. You guys rock!