COM and .NET Component Services (O'Reilly Windows)

While Microsoft is about to replace COM components with the new .NET standard, COM+ is still a viable technology and will be fully supported (and even enhanced) in the new .NET Framework. Much of COM and .NET Component Services concentrates on C++ and Visual Basic examples that explore areas of functionality, plus practical tips for configuring and administering components with such tools as the COM+ Services Explorer.

The expert perspective here will help you design components that work with COM+ effectively. There is plenty of background material on COM+ topics like marshaling and interception, which allow objects to be pooled behind the scenes on the Windows platform. But the focus is on the real APIs and programming techniques developers need to work with COM+. This practical focus extends to specific suggestions and pitfalls to avoid for each area of COM+ development. There is good material on COM+ transactions here, along with some excellent material on asynchronous components that tap COM+ queuing capabilities.

The book concludes with a long chapter on .NET, which brings this title current with Microsoft's new programming platform. The author recaps the APIs covered earlier in the book using .NET and C#. (COM+ is still a part of .NET, but you'll use a different set of APIs and programming language to work with it.) The book concludes with a glance at new COM+ 1.5 features, plus a quick introduction to .NET.

In all, this title strikes a good balance between the old and the new. After reading this smart and fast-moving text, developers will be able to immediately learn COM+ skills that will have practical benefit for both current and future Windows software. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Overview on COM+ Components (features and basic deployment), COM+ contexts (marshaling and interception), COM+ instance management, object pooling, just-in-time activation (JITA), COM+ transactions, transaction basics, compensating transactions, two-phase commits and voting, apartments and concurrency, activities, the neutral threading apartment, APIs for manipulating the COM+ catalog, security (roles, programmatic security and pitfalls), queued components (synchronous and asynchronous components), COM+ events and the Event Service (filtering, distributed and asynchronous events), sample code in C++ (and Visual Basic 6), .NET serviced components, .NET packages and APIs for COM+ development, introduction to COM+ 1.5 and the .NET Framework, and administration and programming hints for COM+.

Product Description
This book is for experienced Microsoft COM developers who want to advance to building component-based applications with the COM+ services available with Windows 2000. Assuming familiarity with classic COM, it focuses on the added services of COM+, including support for transactions, queued components, events, concurrency management, and security. COM and .NET Component Services is the first book to stress the importance of learning to use COM+ services for both .NET and COM component-based applications. Since most companies have considerable investment in existing code base and development skills, COM+ can serve as a migration path for companies and developers. Companies can start (or continue) their projects in COM, using COM+ as a supporting platform for component services, and then when the time comes to move to .NET, they can start plugging .NET components seamlessly into the same architecture.

This book changed all that. Finally, it all makes sense. This is by far the best book on this subject that I have read. Every piece of COM+ is explained clearly and with enough detail to get the point across without bogging down the reader. It even answered some difficult mysteries for me such as "Why is the JITA checkbox greyed out for my transactional components?" I couldn't even find an answer for that one on the newsgroups.

The .NET coverage is brief and was probably an afterthought (in that it appears in a chapter at the end rather than integrated throughout the book), but it is enough to get started. I am looking forward to a second edition of this book that focuses on .NET and has all the code examples in C#. Juval, please write that!


Know COM, Learn COM+ and .NET component Services   December 1, 2001
Heinrich Gantenbein (San Jose, CA United States)
14 out of 23 found this review helpful

This is one of the best technical books, I have read. It assumes knowledge of COM and object-oriented technologies. The clarity in the areas COM+ interception, threading, security, transaction handling is exceptional.