You always see an author thank his or her family, and until you write a book, you can't really understand why. Writing a book is time consuming–you spend a lot of time looking out of a window watching the seasons pass by, wishing you were kayaking on the nearby lake, or going for a bike ride, or anything other than being inside staring at a glowing rectangle hoping the words start flowing soon. We've made almost one complete turn around the sun since we started this book, and it is the culmination of a great deal of work.

So, at the risk of sounding clichéd, I have to thank my wife Kathy, and daughter Anna Claire, who can now have her daddy back.

The impetus to write a technical book doesn't come from money–there's a small advance, and if you're really lucky, maybe some royalties. Fame? Not really–if you're popular, maybe a dozen people will tweet about you. The urge to write a book comes from something more fundamental, something our parents instilled in us and we try and instill in our children–sharing. Share your experiences, share what you know, as doing so builds a stronger community. I hope you find what we've done to be useful.

Nathan A. Duchene has been developing in the .NET Framework since 2005, starting with ASP.NET 2.0. He found a need for a website with the features available in ASP.NET, and with some guidance from Richard J. Dudley, quickly developed and published his web application to the world. After experiencing the ease and flexibility offered by .NET to developers, he decided to learn more features, best practices, and tricks to enhance his web application, build new web applications, write and maintain some console applications, and much more.

In 2008, Nathan and Richard developed and entered a web application into a coding contest, which was voted by the community as the second best of all submissions, losing only by a few votes. Winning an MSDN Premium subscription, it allowed Nathan to play with a number of systems and tools, strengthening his knowledge in the development world.

Nathan, along with Richard, was part of a group that gave a presentation on Silverlight 2 in the Windows Azure cloud in 2009. Both technologies were in beta or pre-beta phases, which caused unexpected issues. Even though the application would not work, the talk was a great success in explaining Windows Azure and Silverlight 2 before they were released to the world.

Nathan is currently an Application Developer for a supply chain solutions company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Along with some .NET development, he also develops and administers solutions using Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005/2008, Microsoft Biztalk Server 2009, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

This is Nathan's first book and has been a tremendous experience from front to back. After being given the opportunity to pass on some knowledge back to the community, he hopes to have the opportunity in the future to write more books for the community. After observing how quickly technology changes, he feels it's important to release up-to-date information for others to make use of. While Nathan and Richard had to re-write numerous chapters along the way to include new features or changes to existing features, the experience was amazing.