Customer Reviews

C# COM+ Programming (With CD-ROM)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I honestly don't like writing bad reviews but I feel compelled to save people money when I can. Unless you are looking for a manager's overview of COM+ programming don't buy this book. Coverage of COM+ itself is very light. The author appears to assume that the reader has picked that up someplace else... probably by writing COM+ components in VB 6. There are no in-depth discussions of the technology or even best practices. The jist of this book is that now you use attributes to COM+ enable your code written in C#. The coverage of what attributes are available to you and within those attributes what options are supported and what they mean is likewise incomplete and lacking in depth. However, where I really lost respect for this book was when I looked in the registry to see what was going on from a COM perspective for the classes that I had built based on the code fragments in the text. What a mess. Stale registry entries for previous builds of my components were everywhere. It took me an hour to get the mess cleaned up and several more to piece together what was going on and realize that there are a lot of COM specific attributes never mentioned in this book that you need to known about in order to build a COM+ component _correctly_ using C#. And as I have discovered that is the crux of the situation. To do COM+ using C# you need to be _very_ familiar with COM-CLR interop. Basically you need _much_ more information than this book provides.

In summary I believe that reading this book will serve only to make one `dangerous' not proficient in COM+ development using C#.

Superficial information, short and incomplete code examples.
I had a basic understanding of COM+, transactions, MSMQ, etc. and that has not increased after reading this book.
If you know COM+ you don't need this book, if you don't this book will not help you.

This book is poorly organized and lacks focus. The topics' coverage is shallow. Even with the lightweight content, it should be titled or described as "How to Transition COM+ programming with VB to C#".

I hesitate even giving this book a one.

This book is pretty useless at a very important topic. Most discussion is done without complete cohesive examples (from server to client).

Don't even think that the included CD is worth it !!!

Also, because of no author support I spent hours trying to make the .Net remoting example work in IIS all because the sample .config file was wrong (I actually found the solution at another website) !

Discussions on integrating COM+ legacy components and accessing these from C# were also vague ! Again with no examples !

If you're looking to get a solid background and understanding on the subject matter, this book does a very good job of covering the bases (not just the basics). What's better is that it comes in a size (# of pages) that one can actually hope to digest. Well done.

This book provides excellent insight into the operation of .Net and .Net with COM.
It is for someone who wants to understand how it works rather than how to make it work ie. more for a designer than a coder. This info is a lot more difficult to obtain than how to use the various framework classes.
It also lets you know where the performance issues are going to cause problem.

The path from COM+ components to the equivalent services in .NET is often misunderstood, yet vital to building a large transactional system using Microsoft's flagship development platform. This book does an excellent job of taking the reader through the .NET serviced component support with reference to the existing COM+ Services. From an introductory chapter covering the .NET architecture, the author takes a journey through transactions, role-based security, events, object pooling and queued components. The book is both concise and readable with well-worked examples: not one of those weighty tomes that fill your shelf with a rehash of existing documentation! My biggest criticism is the lack of depth in the chapter on transactions, which lets the book down slightly; a longer discussion in place of the appendix introducing C# would have been appreciated. Nevertheless, this book is well worth the money.

One month after the release of .Net,
this book will put you at the right path to building
servicedComponents using C#.
it covers most of the com+ services + a brief of the new features in Com+ 1.5 and IIS 6.0
this book talk (as it should!) only about Com+ with C#
no asp/ado/bla... technologies are included.
It is great for programmers who woked with com+ with C++/VB.

COM+ is equivalent with Java's EJB. I was utterly disappointed to find the book littered with misspellings. There is no depth to its topic coverage. The book's table of contents is misleading. Save your heard earned money and wait for something near the quality displayed by Oreilly's Enterprise JavaBeans.

This is a "second level" book. You had best already be pretty familiar with .NET and C#, because coverage of these topics is not at an introductory level. The COM+ coverage is similarly paced, but has a lot more introductory material.

But that is one of the reasons I like this book. I don't NEED another introduction to .NET or to C#, and there are other COM+ books as well. What this book does very well is show how COM+ and .NET go together, how, in fact, they must go together if you plan to do enterprise level development.

Beyer is a very good writer, at least to my taste. He covers a lot of material with not a lot of words, and he does it with great clarity. He doesn't need 1200 pages and huge margins.

.NET and COM+ are partner technologies and one does not replace the other, so this book covers a very important topic and does it very well.