Acknowledgments

We have a large number of people to thank for their contributions to this book. Chris Sells would like to thank his wife, Melissa, and his boys, John and Tom, for sparing him countless evenings and weekends to work on this project. Chris would also like to thank Brent Rector for letting him horn in on the first edition of this book, Kirk Fertitta for updating a large portion of this book to ATL 7, and Chris Tavares for bringing this project home.

Brent would like to thank his wife, Lisa, and his children, Carly and Sean, for delaying the delivery of this book significantly. If it weren't for them, he would never have left the computer some days. Brent would also like to thank Chris Sells for his intelligence, patience, and general good looks.^[2]

^[2] You get only one guess as to who wrote that part, and he doesn't have my initials or my good looks. BER

Kirk Fertitta would like to thank the following: the readers, who, after all, make book writing a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor; Chris Sells, for getting him involved in this book project and for his insights into ATL and into the writing process itself; Brad Handa and Hugues Valois, for countless hours working on real projects unraveling COM and ATL mysteries; all the subscribers to DevelopMentor's ATL discussion list for their sharing their perspectives and experiences with many of the new ATL features; MusicMatch (now Yahoo!) employees and contractors for all their feedback on using ATL in a very large commercial application (many of the caveats of using some of the attributed ATL features were exposed by this talented and patient group of developers); and Stephane Thomas, of Addison-Wesley, for her patience in getting this project started.

Chris Tavares would like to thank his long-suffering wife, Wendy, for her understanding, love, and support. The late-night glasses of water and bowls of ice cream were instrumental in finishing this book and keeping Chris sane. Thanks also go to his son, Matthew, who didn't mind too much when Daddy disappeared into his office for days at a time. Chris would also like to thank Chris Sells for the opportunity to help get the second edition out to the ATL community.

Chris, Kirk, Brent, and Chris would like to thank several folks together, starting first with the reviewers: Bill Craun, Johan Ericsson, Igor Tandetnik, Kim Gräsman, Jeff Galinovsky, Igor Tandetnik, and Nenad Stefanovic. Special thanks go to the members of the ATL team, including Christian Beaumont, Jim Springfield, Walter Sullivan, and Mark Kramer, for suffering nagging questions and taking the time to answer them. More special thanks to Don Box for his MSJ ATL feature, which so heavily influenced the ATL short-course and, in turn, this book. Thanks to reviewers Don Box, Keith Brown, Jon Flanders, Mike Francis, Kevin Jones, Stanley Lippman, Dharma Shukla, Jim Springfield, Jeff Stalls, Jaganathan Thangavelu, and Jason Whittington. Special thanks go to Dharma for his especially thorough and educational reviews. Thanks to Fritz Onion for his groundbreaking work delving into the depths of ATL control containment. Thanks to a former student, Valdan Vidakovic, for inspiring Chris to delve a bit more into the HTML control. Thanks to Tim Ewald, Jim Springfield, and Don Box for their help in developing the forwarding shims trick. Thanks to the members of the ATL and DCOM mailing lists, especially Don Box, Tim Ewald, Charlie Kindel, Valery Pryamikov, Mark Ryland, and Zane Thomas. Also, we'd like to thank George Shepherd for his initial research and even a little writing for the ATL Server chapters. And last, but not least, thanks to Addison-Wesley, especially Karen Gettman, Lori Lyons, and Kim Boedigheimer, for providing an environment in which we actually want to write (although not as quickly or as concisely as they might prefer. . .).