Preface

This book began in the spring of 1999, when I developed a set of slides and presented an “Introduction to IPv6” course at Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Washington, to four students. Although the turnout was not what I expected, the time spent learning IPv6, creating the slide presentation, and presenting IPv6 technology to these curious students proved to be an invaluable experience and laid down a firm foundation for future endeavors.

In 2000, as a technical writer for Windows, I wrote the “Introduction to IP version 6” white paper that is published on the Microsoft Windows IPv6 Web site (www.microsoft.com/ipv6) and generally inserted myself in any documentation task associated with IPv6. I also developed and delivered an “IPv6 Overview” internal course, with help on Windows Sockets from Tom Fout. This one-day course was taught to Microsoft software design engineers, software test engineers, program managers, and technical writers beginning in October of 2000.

My transition to a program manager for technical content development afforded me the time, focus, and experience to turn the “IPv6 Overview” courseware and numerous other white papers and articles about IPv6 into Understanding IPv6 (Microsoft Press, ISBN 978-0735612457), the previous version of this book. Between the publication of Understanding IPv6 in November of 2002 and now, I continued to develop content for IPv6, supporting interim releases of IPv6 technology for Windows XP and the releases of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, which have fully integrated IPv6 support for services and applications.

This second edition of Understanding IPv6 contains the culmination of all of these efforts. It is my fervent hope that the work that I started in the spring of 1999 has culminated in a wellorganized and readable text from which you can learn and understand the concepts, principles, and processes of IPv6.

—Joseph Davies

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Acknowledgments

I would like to the thank the following people at Microsoft for participating in the technical reviews of the chapters and appendixes of the second edition of this book: Khaja Ahmed, Chris Engdahl, Lee Gibson, Parakram Khandpur, Arnaud Lheureux, Chris Mitchell, Mike Owen, Corey Plett, Jory Prather, Aaron Schrader, Ben Schultz, Amit Sehgal, Sean Siler, Jeromy Statia, Michael Surkan, Lee Walker, Jeff Westhead, Kalven Wu, and Yi Zhao. I would like to give special thanks to Chris Mitchell for the Foreword and to Ben Schultz for the “Direct from the Source” sidebar in the Introduction. I would like to give honorable mention to Dmitry Anipko, a software development engineer on the Windows Networking Core development team, who gave me very detailed feedback on both standards-based IPv6 and the implementation details of IPv6 in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

I would also like to thank Maria Gargiulo (content project manager at Microsoft Press), John Pierce (project manager), Bob Dean (technical reviewer), Roger LeBlanc (copy editor), Margaret Berson (proofreader), Lucie Haskins (indexer), and the production team at Interactive Composition Corporation (ICC).

And last, I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to my wife, Kara, and daughter, Katie, for their patience and tolerance for time away during the last weeks of writing.

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