Acknowledgments

Both Nick and I have contributed to SharePoint books in the past, but even with the experience of doing that, we completely underestimated the time and the dedication that a book like this requires. We couldn’t have completed the book without support from our families, colleagues, and friends.

I’d specifically like to thank Vicki Lonsdale and Rio Lonsdale (wife and daughter) for their patience during the writing of this book. Nick and I would also like to thank Vicki and Sophie Calienda (Nick’s fiancée) for their continued support for Lightning Tools. Todd Bleeker of Mindsharp provided us with the opportunity of writing this book for Manning, and I want to thank him for that and also for his advice on some of the content.

There were two areas of this book that couldn’t be written without help from other experts. Joseph Fultz from Microsoft provided appendix A, which explains how the Business Data Catalog could be used to connect to an SAP data source. Phill Duffy from Lightning Tools Ltd provided an excellent example of using the Business Data Catalog API with Windows Workflow Foundations (WF) in chapter 9.

Hrayr Diloyan, Rob Foster, Paul Culmsee, Steve Smith, Spence Harbar, Bob Fox, and Andrew Connell also reviewed the book and offered some good hints and tips on how to improve some of the content. Christina Wheeler (CM Portal Solutions) helped out by providing the technical review of the book, and thankfully didn’t find too many code changes that were required.