While it goes without saying, I owe all that I am to my Lord, Jesus Christ. Thank you for all that You are and have done in my life.

While I wrote this book myself, I actually had a very talented team that worked with me to refine the content. My peer review team consisted of extremely talented developers and Microsoft MVPs. If the book makes any sense at all, I owe it to my peer review team for helping form the content. Folks on this team include Mikhail Dikov, Darrin Bishop, Al Pascual, Alvin Bruney, and Morgan Everett. Also, big thanks to Mark Collins, Nick Swan, Todd Baginski, and Sahil Malik for feedback on various chapters. I’d like to thank Sahil Malik for his excellent writing about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and SharePoint. I’d also like to thank the following friends at Microsoft for their continued support: April Spence, Lawrence Lliu, Paul Andrew, and Melissa Travers.

I’d also like to send a shout-out to Ted Pattison: thanks for letting me write Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with you. This book is a continuation of our chapter on AJAX Web Parts, and I wouldn’t be writing this without our last book project.

I’d also like to thank Ben Ryan for picking up this book project, especially with the current flood of AJAX books on the market. I trust this book will be unique in your library!

On the editing side—John Pierce was the man responsible for the polish—John, I’m amazed at your editing skills and the readability that you’ve added. Per Blomqvist was responsible for the technical review and provided invaluable feedback on the technical content. If the code runs, we can thank Per! Additional thanks to Devon Musgrave for helping me start the book out and providing those early edits. I’d like to thank the entire Microsoft Press team for making this happen—you’ve truly made this a great experience and you’ve helped me write a great book. I wouldn’t want to write a book without you!

In the community, I owe a lot to friends like Joe Mayo, Roy Ogborn, and the Denver community of Microsoft Developers, led by fine folks like Chris Wallace, to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for getting me started with Microsoft technologies. When I first arrived in Denver, I was just learning .NET 1.0, and a lot of people in the Denver community have contributed to my success. A special thanks to Roy Haschenberger and family for your support throughout the years. And Amos, thanks for buying my book.

I’d like to especially thank the NewsGator Enterprise developer team for helping to refine this architecture over the last few years and for giving me a playground to implement these concepts. A big thanks to Lane Mohler, Sherstin Lauman, Brian Agnes, Josh Aragon, and Tom McIntyre on the NewsGator Enterprise developer team, and Brian Kellner, Ashley Roach, Karyn German, and Greg Reinacker in NewsGator Management for supporting this effort through NewsGator Enterprise and NewsGator Social Sites. This book is largely about the architecture patterns we’ve developed and refined at NewsGator by developing services first and AJAX applications second. I’d also like to send a shout-out to the other AJAX developers at NewsGator: "Was that a postback?"

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife for her support in this project. Sallina, you’re an amazing wife and I couldn’t have written this without your support. This book is for our children; they will never have to write postback code.