One hesitates between acknowledging one's obligations and implicating one's friends.
—H. G. Wells, from the preface to The Outline of History
People who have read drafts of this book have asked me where I found my inspiration for writing the way I have. Influence has come from many corners, so let me list those sources as well as offer my thanks to the following groups and individuals who have helped create this tome about OLE.
My good friends Bruce Eckel and Charlie Kindel. Bruce is a wonderful source of information and a great sounding board for new ideas (enlightenment, as Bruce calls it). He is also the one person who will actually order decaf in Seattle, and he is probably the only person who remembers what I looked like my first time through Splash Mountain at Disneyland. My thanks to Charlie for being the primary technical reviewer for this second edition, as well as for having reviewed the first edition. Charlie and I once shared offices at Microsoft and seem to keep ending up in the same group. (We're now both program managers on the OLE team.)
The many people within Microsoft who have contributed to both editions of this book, including Phil Cooper, Nigel Thompson, Scott Skorupa, Sara Williams, Vinoo Cherian, Craig Wittenberg, Douglas Hodges, Alex Tilles, Mark Bader, Dean McCrory, David Maymudes, William Hsu, Tony Williams, Bob Atkinson, Chris Zimmerman, Mark Ryland, Nat Brown, and the entire OLE team. To all of you, thanks for all your useful real-world insights.
All the programmers in the trenches who are usually told to do too much with too little information. Without you, I'd have little incentive to write a book like this.
All the developers who devoured my draft copies as soon as I could write them and who sent words of encouragement, including Atif Aziz, Joe Najjar, Burt Harris, Brent Rector, Brian Enright, Bruce Fogelsong, Richard Watson, John A. Legelis, Brett Foster, Jurgen Heymann, Dominic Kyrie, Marc Singer, Marcellus Bucheit, Lars Nyman, Howard Chalkley, and Jim Adam, a total Python Head, who reminded me that it was Patsy who actually said Camelot was only a model. Thanks also to Burt Harris (again) and Thomas Holaday for setting me straight on the finer points of C++ programming.
John Pierce, Jim Fuchs, Kathleen Atkins, Shawn Peck, and the people at Microsoft Press who did all the production work for this edition and who let me get away with all the crazy things I did here. This includes Ron Lamb, Seth McEvoy, and Kathleen Atkins (take two), who did it all for the first edition. Thanks also to Dean Holmes (now retired from Microsoft Press) for helping me get this book started by saying, "Cool. Do it!"
Monty Python, Yoda, the Harvard Lampoon, and MAD Magazine, as well
as authors Donald Norman, Robert Fulghum, Riane Eisler, Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister, Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, Richard Brodie, Roger S. Jones, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Harris, and Jim Stacey. Thanks for whatever it is that made me include the crazy things I wrote in this book. You've all written damn good books of your own.
Photographer Dewitt Jones, Lynette Sheppard, and the entire group from our week at HollyHock. You showed me how to enjoy and appreciate doing the crazy things I have done in this book. May you always fly with fro-zen eagles.
Bob Taniguchi and Viktor Grabner. Thanks to Bob for helping me get into the position at Microsoft to write this book, and to Viktor for teaching me what making my job obsolete really means and how to be a little crazy in the process.
Microsoft's Developer Relations Group. Thanks for allowing me to lock myself in my office undisturbed for months on end (or to simply work at home) while I was doing crazy things.
The guys I always seem to end up hanging out with at conferences, including Bruce "Enlightened" Eckel, Charles "I'm glad I didn't have to write an OLE book" Petzold, and Richard "Why aren't you using MFC?" Hale Shaw. They're all just plain crazy, in a good sort of way <gdr>.
And, finally, my wife and partner, Kristi, who was always there with support and encouragement, even though I'm a little crazy at times.
Kraig Brockschmidt
Redmond (and Bothell), Washington
April 1995