Acknowledgments

A book like this would not be possible without the assistance of many different people. I would particularly like to thank the following:

• Simon Pease, for his assistance, encouragement, and development of initial concept.

• Mike Ormond and Eric Nelson at Microsoft, for their assistance and contributions.

• Stefan Turalski, for his excellent technical review skills, assistance, encouragement, and late-night discussions!

• Matt Moodie and Anita Castro, for their editing skills and for minimizing my crimes against grammar (and, yes, I did notice the removal of some of my jokes!).

• Matt Lacey, for reviewing my early drafts, and everyone at DevEvening.co.uk, for proving my wife wrong—yes, people do want to talk about programming at the pub (but we all knew that beer, food, and programming was a good combination).

• John Sanderson, Bruce Richards, Chris Canning, and Pat Simons. I learned a lot from working with you guys.

• John Hargrove for his last-minute errata.

Contributors

When covering a huge spectrum of technologies, there is a very real danger that no subject is given sufficient coverage to be of any real use to anyone. It is also impossible for one developer to be an expert in all the areas that we will be covering. I am no exception, so I am very grateful to have had the assistance of those who are experts in their various fields.

I am grateful to the following people (in no particular order), who have assisted with answering queries, correcting mistakes, or providing contributions:

Jon Skeet, Andy Britcliffe, Ray Booysen, John McLoughlin, Rusty Johnson, Jeremy Skinner, Sebastian Lambla, Dane Morgridge, Barry Dorrans, Craig Murphy, Julie Lerman, Daniel Moth, Danny Shih, Shawn Farkas, Chris Hay, Phil Winstanley, David Sussman, Michael Foord, Jonathan Keen, Gabriel Torok, Tarek Mahmoud Sayed, Rene Schulte.

Also, thanks to Kimberlee Kessler Design for allowing the use of the image in Figure 3-2.