Say what you will about Microsoft, they know how to successfully build and release software. Vince Maraia has been a key member of the build teams for many of their major software releases over the last fifteen years. In this book he distills the wisdom he has learned about building software, while also setting it into the context of related steps, including configuration management and deployment. While he uses Microsoft tools and case studies from within Microsoft, the book is as tool-agnostic as possible, to make the ideas applicable to the broadest possible range of readers. The book is written so that each chapter builds upon the previous one, following the standard development schedule; however, each chapter can also stand alone as a reference to that particular piece of the process. Microsoft has been so successful at developing build procedures that work that they will be incorporating many of them in the forthcoming suite of products called Visual Studio 2005 Team System, so this book is being released at a very opportune time.

Vincent Maraia started his computer career programming on a Commodore Pet in the 8th grade; with 8KB of RAM and a 1 MHz processor, it was an impressive machine in 1978. Looking back at high school, it seems that the typing and cooking classes he took contributed the most to his success in college, not the college prep classes. Pascal really never took off.

While pursuing a duel major at Oregon State University—Engineering Physics and a Mechanical or Electrical Engineering degree—he decided to pursue an internship at a small- to medium-size software company in Redmond, Washington. The company was offering a 386/20 MHz computer (top of the line in 1989) as a gift upon completion of the internship. Since he had enough credits for an Engineering Physics degree, he decided to stay at Microsoft once his internship was over and has been there ever since.

At Microsoft, he lived for about four years in the NT Build Lab shipping NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, and part of NT 4.0. He also worked on hotfixes, service packs, and test builds. After a couple of failed multi-media projects, he then went to the Visual Studio group, shipping version 1, VS 97. He also designed the build for BackOffice/Small Business Server, shipping SBS 1.0 and BackOffice 2.0. For the past six years, he has been in Premier Services, consulting on how Microsoft does builds, source code control, and release management. He has been to over 55 Microsoft customer sites executing Build and SCM architecture reviews.

Until he met his wife eight years ago, he use to love to hang out at bookstores on Friday and Saturday nights in the computer section, occasionally drifting into the biography and science sections.

He loves spending time with his family and is also a true sports fan who plays on city league softball teams when he is not writing or traveling.