Acknowledgments

In high school I developed a love for books. As a bibliophile, I thought it would be so cool if I could someday write one. At the time I knew nothing of development and would never imagine that I would at some point write a book on the topic.

This book, which is my first, got started because Gwenan Spearing of Apress e-mailed me in August of 2012. I believe she was reading the feedback about some talks I gave for aspConf and mvcConf 2 and for some reason thought she should e-mail me. Thank you so much.

This of course leads me to the technical community. Though we developers like to get in silly fights (spaces, not tabs, and single quotes in JavaScript strings, just in case you are curious) all the time, it’s actually a great community to be involved with. In particular I need to thank Eric Hexter, Javier Lozano, and Jon Galloway for allowing me to be involved with them in C4MVC, mvcConf, and later aspConf. And in general I want to thank the technical community for being awesome. Thanks to the local user groups for allowing me to test out much of this material in presentations, especially my own North Dallas .NET User Group.

I had a job while writing this book, and this project did take attention away from my work on occasion. I want to thank my friend and boss, Shane Henderson, for being patient with me in this process. You are the best boss ever. Thanks for putting up with all my requests for new devices to play with (even when you don’t approve them), for the flexibility to work and write, and in general for putting up with me. This book also affected my team a bit, and I want to say thank you to them. The whole mobile team at Match.com is great. Every day I look forward to coming in to work with you guys. I hope you all realize how great you are as a team, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to join you two years ago. You are an inspiration.

Thanks to my editors at Apress, Gwenan Spearing, Kevin Shea, and Douglas Pundick. You have all been very patient with me (I can be a little slow sometimes, though I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you of that), and I appreciate you perseverance. You have been great.

Thanks to Brandon Satrom, my technical reviewer. We met for the first time at HTML5tx, and I knew then that you were the kind of geek that I could get along with. You gave great feedback along the way while I was writing the book, and I thank you for your encouragement.

Several friends gave feedback on chapters as I wrote them. I want to especially thank Wil Bloodworth, Mike Randrup, and Neil Duffy for reading chapters from my book. Your feedback was valuable. The book is better thanks to your efforts.

Thanks to Randall Arnold and Nokia for letting me borrow a few Windows Phones for testing. That was very helpful during the early stages of the book. A big thanks as well to Chris Koenig and Microsoft as well for giving me a Windows Phone 8 developer device to test with. Chris, you’ve been a friend for a while and I appreciate your continued support. You rock. And thanks to Match.com for giving us a nice supply of mobile test devices.

And finally, thanks to the family. They have all been patient as I worked on this project. The wife of course wanted to hang out more, Jonathan wanted more time playing Legos, Abby wanted more time playing with her stuffed animals, and Samuel just wanted more attention. I’m glad I can now give it.