ADO.NET  Examples and Best Practices
for C# Programmers
by William R. Vaughn with Peter Blackburn

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William R. Vaughn

www.betav.com  

(Bill to his friends) was born in Washington, D.C., and was raised as an Army brat. He traveled with his family all over the world--to Germany, Thailand, and throughout the United States. He graduated high school at International School, Bangkok (class of ’65) and attended Augustana College, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the University of Kansas at Lawrence; Central Texas College and Mary Hardin-Baylor College, in Killeen, Texas; and the University of Texas at Dallas. During this diverse schooling, Bill earned his pilot’s wings from the Army, an associate’s degree in systems analysis, a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies. He was also recently awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Advancing Computer Technology in Phoenix, Arizona. He's still a little hesitant about being called "Dr. Bill."

After mustering out of the Army in the early 1970s, Bill started working in Austin, Texas, as a mainframe programmer for the Texas Department of Public Safety (the state police)--attached to the Narcotics Service. He was assigned to create a massive state-wide registration system for everyone in Texas who handled narcotics: doctors, veterinarians, pharmacies, and drug dealers. He enlisted prisoners at Huntsville to do the initial data entry and was given free reign to design systems, forms, applications, and procedures. Bill enjoyed this job immensely and he might still be there today if Electronic Data Systems hadn’t recruited and moved him to Dallas. After several years of bulldogging and calf-roping mainframe health-care systems and really big databases, he moved to working as a microsystems consultant to Ross Perot and developed an accounting system on the IBM 5110 (IBM’s first attempt at the PC). Yes, he volunteered to fly the helicopter in the Iranian rescue mission, but Ross turned him down--Bill's instructor pilot was working for the company at the time.

Bill spent about a decade in the Dallas area, working for Mostek, Challenge Systems (you never heard of it), Digital Research, and CPT Corporation. He wore many hats in those companies, learning about and designing new hardware systems, as well as writing, designing, marketing, supporting, and implementing a number of Z80 and early personal and process-control systems, but he kept his focus on microcomputers. He wrote and tuned operating systems, and a number of business applications. He also managed a team of developers working on everything from BIOS code to language translators (as in French to English to Spanish) to office management systems.

In 1986, Microsoft moved Bill to Redmond, Washington, to work in the Windows development liaison group. Bill went on to spend more than five years at Microsoft University, developing and teaching courses on DB-Library, Transact-SQL, OS/2, and Visual Basic. In those early days at Microsoft his examples were written in C, QuickBasic, or the first versions of VB. When MSU folded, he took some time off to write and self-publish the first edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to VBSQL and later joined the Microsoft Visual Basic user education team. Bill spent five years there as a senior technical writer, working on Visual Basic data access documentation--mostly related to client/server systems. In addition to writing the Visual Basic 3.0 data access guide, he wrote the back half of the Visual Basic 4.0–specific Building Client/Server Applications with Visual Basic and about a bazillion Help topics for Visual Basic 3.0 through 5.0.

In September 1996, Bill was promoted to Visual Basic Enterprise Product Manager and moved over to the Visual Studio marketing team. In this role, he listened to customers and told them (and the press) what Visual Basic was capable of doing. After a couple of years of travel and long hours Bill moved to the Microsoft Technical Education group—an internal training team responsible for keeping Microsoft’s own developers up to speed on the latest technologies.

In the fall of 2000, Bill "retired" from Microsoft and started retooling to pick up .NET. A year later he finished the book you are now reading--the Second Edition of his best-seller ADO Examples and Best Practices.

Nowadays Bill spends much of his time lecturing and writing about Visual Basic and has been rated as the top speaker at VBits and other conferences--when he’s not offending someone with his impersonations of Ross Perot or Robin Williams. To try something "completely different," Bill takes pictures wherever he travels as he plans to publish a CD containing his favorite wallpaper images. He's also taking voice-over classes at the University of Washington in case this .NET stuff doesn't work out. He thinks it's always a good idea to have a fall-back plan.

Visit his Web site at www.betav.com for details on his current course offerings.