Acknowledgments

No book can be published by the author alone, and I am extremely grateful for the multitude of people who helped me with this one. The order in which I thank people is not significant, except for those that come first. By far, my family has made the biggest sacrifice to allow me to complete this. Benjamin, Hanna, and Abigail often had a Daddy distracted by this book, but Elisabeth suffered even more so. She was often left to take care of things, holding the family’s world together on her own. I would like to say it got easier with each edition but, alas, no; as the kids got older, life became more hectic, and without me Elisabeth was stretched to the breaking point virtually all the time. A huge sorry and ginormous “Thank You!”

Many technical editors reviewed each chapter in minute detail to ensure technical accuracy. I was often amazed by the subtle errors these folks still managed to catch: Paul Bramsman, Kody Brown, Ian Davis, Doug Dechow, Gerard Frantz, Thomas Heavey, Anson Horton, Brian Jones, Shane Kercheval, Angelika Langer, Eric Lippert, John Michaelis, Jason Morse, Nicholas Paldino, Jon Skeet, Michael Stokesbary, Robert Stokesbary, John Timney, and Stephen Toub. Thanks also to Mandy Frei who diligently kept notes of changes needed for reprints.

Eric is no less than amazing. His grasp of the C# vocabulary is truly astounding and I am very appreciative of his edits, especially when he pushed for perfection in terminology. His improvements to the C# 3.0 chapters were incredibly significant, and in the second edition my only regret was that I didn’t have him review all the chapters. However, that regret is no longer. Eric painstakingly reviewed every Essential C# 5.0 chapter with amazing detail and precision. I am extremely grateful for his contribution to making this book even better than the earlier editions. Thanks, Eric! I can’t imagine anyone better for the job. You deserve all the credit for raising the bar from good to great.

Like Eric and C#, there are fewer than a handful of people who know .NET multithreading as well as Stephen Toub. Accordingly, Stephen focused on the two rewritten (for a third time) multithreading chapters and their new focus on asynchronous support in C# 5.0. Thanks, Stephen!

Thanks to everyone at Addison-Wesley for their patience in working with me in spite of my frequent focus on everything else except the manuscript. Thanks to Elizabeth Ryan, Audrey Doyle, Vicki Rowland, Curt Johnson, and Joan Murray. Joan deserves a special medal of patience for the number of times I delayed not only with deliverables but even responding to emails.