x Acknowledgments A good ensemble of people made this book happen: Ben Ryan, Lynn Finnel, Kenn Scribner, Roger LeBlanc, and Robert Lyon. To all of them, I feel I owe a monumental "Thank You" for being so kind, patient, and accurate. They reviewed, edited, reworked, and tested all the text and code this book is made of. Kenn--how can I thank you enough? I knew you from when we worked together in the past. I wanted you to be the technical editor of the book just because I knew you. Sure, you tend to write too many comments sometimes, which alters my internal state. But much more than this, you always write the comments that MUST be written. You catch everything; and I'll catch you for any other books I might be writing in the future. (And I do have quite a few ideas I'm quietly composing and that are taking form and substance in my mind already.) Lynn--your commitment and dedication were absolutely total. And I cross my fingers that I'll have you on board again. Or is it the other way around, and I should hope you accept me again? No matter what, I'm looking forward to working with you again. And I'm very keen on this point. Roger and Robert--I was going to write separate notes but then I realized I was going to say the same to both of you. Roger for the text and Robert for the code, you made this book much smoother and often read between the lines and understood my intentions better than me. Ben--you're the entry point in the pipeline. You made it; and I was just a tool. Hopefully, an intelligent tool. Other people contributed in various ways to improve the overall quality of the book you hold in your hands. An unordered list of names certainly includes Fernando Guerrero and all the folks at Solid Quality Learning, Marius Constantinescu, Marco Bellinaso, Steve Toub, Jay Greenfield, Andrea Saltarello, and Raffaele Rialdi. Matthew Gibbs, Nikhil Kothari, David Ebbo, Simon Calvert, Dmitri Robsman, and Jonathan Hawkins on the ASP.NET team provided significant help and contributed a lot to transform my hunches and hypotheses into correct statements. And thanks to Scott Guthrie for being so surprisingly quick with his answers. A special mention goes to Lutz Roeder and his wonderful tool, .NET Reflector, which I extensively used to dissect the internal plumbing of ASP.NET classes and controls. If you don't know it (really?) get it now at http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet . Another special mention is for the people at Openwave, in particular my friends Luca Passani and Ron Mandel. Thanks for supporting me and for the great Openwave Simulator tool. It was a great pleasure! --Dino PS:After years of practice, this 800 page book was usual business for Silvia and kids (Francesco and Michela). It was nothing special, just everyday work. They know me, and how to handle me.