Designing Scalable .NET Applications

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Technical Reviewer: Phil Pledger
Editorial Board: Dan Appleman, Craig Berry, Gary Cornell, Tony Davis, Steven Rycroft, Julian Skinner, Martin Streicher, Jim Sumser, Karen Watterson, Gavin Wray, John Zukowski
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Project Manager: Tracy Brown Collins
Copy Editor: Ami Knox
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Production Editor: Laura Cheu
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To Opus
—Joachim Rossberg

To Ellen
—Rickard Redler

About the Authors

Joachim Rossberg was born in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. He grew up in the southeast part of Sweden just outside the small town of Kalmar.

After school he worked for ten years as an assistant air traffic controller in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast. There he also met his wife, Karin. The urge to learn more grew stronger, and after some years he started studying psychology. This led to studies at the University of Gothenburg, where he finished his bachelor's degree in psychology in 1998. During this time, his interest in computers began, and he switched to studying informatics instead.

After graduating from university, he began working for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in Gothenburg as a consultant. Joachim has since been working as a system developer, system designer, project manager, and infrastructure designer. He has also, along with Rickard, been a driver for the Microsoft competence network at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Although he is Microsoft focused—as evidenced by his MCSE, MCSA, MCSD, and MCDBA certifications—he also works with other techniques and vendors.

Joachim also has a company on the side called O.R. Education and Development (http://www.rossberg.nu). This company offers training, conferences, and courses in computer-related areas.

Joachim and Karin live in Gothenburg with their two cats. In his spare time, he likes to read (anything nontechnical), listen to music, and watch movies (he used to work at two cinemas in Kalmar in his youth). He also spends a lot of time at the gym, running, or inline skating.

Rickard Redler was born in 1973 in a town called Örebro located in the middle of Sweden. Early in his life, Rickard discovered the abstract world of computers when the Sinclair machine and the Commodore 20/64 were born. From that time, computers were a part of his life.

During his studies at the University of Örebro, he found that the courses at the university didn't give him the practical experience necessary to be a good programmer. He therefore decided to run his own company to get real-life experience—and also make some money. Although his company did quite well, in 1997 Rickard decided to become an employee of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in Örebro. (It took too much time to run the company, and he wanted to spend more time with his wife, Jenny Redler.) Early on, Rickard was involved in the competence network at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in Örebro, and when he and his wife later moved to Gothenburg, Rickard, along with Joachim, became a driver for the Microsoft competence network at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in Gothenburg. Even though Rickard is a Certified Java Developer, these days he is working more and more with Microsoft technologies, and also holds MCP and MCSD certifications.

When Rickard has spare time outside work, he likes to play his guitar and sing old Eric Clapton songs.

About the Technical Reviewer

Phil Pledger has worked in the information technology field for more than 20 years, developing software for a diverse range of applications spanning from business systems to real-time process control systems. Phil has a bachelor's degree and master's degree in computer science from the University of Alabama. In 2002 he founded Idoneous Technologies (http://www.idoneous.com), a company aimed not just at custom software development but also at transferring software development knowledge to clients. Phil can be reached at ppledger@idoneous.com.

Acknowledgments

There are a lot of people who helped us in writing this book.

First of all, we would like to thank Phil Pledger, our technical reviewer, for coming up with great ideas and opinions. Phil's comments and suggestions improved the overall quality of the book.

Then we would like to thank our Swedish language reviewer, Johan Theorin, for making us look more fluent in the English language than we really are.

Sten Sundblad at Sundblad and Sundblad (former ADB Arkitektur) provided good suggestions for the book. Sten and Per Sundblad's book Designing for Scalability Using Windows DNA and Design Patterns for Scalable Microsoft .NET Applications are always sources of inspiration and knowledge.

Erik Quist, formerly at Sundblad and Sundblad, was helpful with answering questions we had.

We would also like to thank Dell Sweden for letting us use its test lab. This provided us with access to hardware we otherwise could not have gotten our hands on. Thomas Melzer and Marko Rähm?have been of great help.

Thanks also to VMware Corporation for providing software so we could test our solutions without ruining ourselves financially with hardware purchases.

Allan Knudsen at Microsoft Sweden helped in providing great documents about Windows Server 2003.

Wolfram Meyer, also at Microsoft Sweden, came up with great input for choosing between Web services and .NET Remoting.

We also want to thank all at Apress who helped with the book, especially Tracy Brown Collins, Ami Knox, and Laura Cheu.

A special thanks to Gary Cornell at Apress for giving us the opportunity to write this book.

Joachim would like to thank Opus, Karin, and Gaston for their support and for accepting all the hours he spent in front of the computer.

Rickard would like to thank his wife, Jenny, for supporting him through all the work on the book.

Without your help we could not have done it. Thanks a lot!