Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-based Applications [Paperback]

Don Box (Author), Keith Brown (Author), Tim Ewald (Author), Chris Sells (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201379686 | ISBN-13: 978-0201379686 | Publication Date: December 13, 1998 | Edition: 1

In Effective COM, the authors, Don Box, Keith Brown, Tim Ewald, and Chris Sells, offer 50 concrete guidelines for creating COM based applications that are more efficient, robust, and maintainable. Drawn from the authors' extensive practical experience working with and teaching COM, these rules of thumb, pitfalls to avoid, and experience-based pointers will enable you to become a more productive and successful COM programmer. These guidelines appear under six major headings: the transition from C++ to COM; interfaces, the fundamental element of COM development; implementation issues; the unique concept of apartments; security; and transactions. Throughout this book, the issues unique to the MTS programming model are addressed in detail.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Effective COM opens with a chapter devoted to the migration from C++ to COM programming, presenting five "attitude shifts" that C++ coders need to undergo to program successfully with COM. It starts with a discussion of defining interfaces in the Interface Definition Language (IDL), and then moves on to a discussion of the unique distribution challenges of COM-based systems. The authors also discuss other differences, such as exception calls.

The next chapter presents tips pertaining to the all-important interfaces in COM. Both the big picture and some precise details are covered to help you implement your interfaces safely, as well as the implementations and the particular challenges that COM presents. The authors emphasize "defensive coding"--pointing out dangerous assumptions and offering suggestions for producing reliable components.

Apartments, security, and transaction management are addressed in succeeding chapters. As with the previous topics, they are handled via a series of specific tips and suggestions. If you're new to COM programming, you should read some more introductory texts first, but if you've already experienced your baptism by fire into the subject, this title can help ease future pain. --Stephen Plain

Review

"COM's `Gang of Four' have distilled years of experience into 50 rules of thumb that all COM developers can benefit from. This book will not teach you the pecularities of IOleInPlaceSiteEx or the subtleties of ATL. Rather, it will improve your designs and your code, and boost you from novicehood through competence towards expertise." -- George V. Reilly, Developer, Microsoft

"It is easy to see why the authors, individually and as a group, are so highly respected. Reading each COM programming tip is like turning on a lightbulb. The ability of the authors to clearly explain complex problems, and then suggest solutions is what makes this book so useful." -- Ranjiv Sharma, Product Architect, Rights Exchange, Inc.

"The comparison to Scott Meyers' Effective C++ is apt. Don't just read Effective COM, internalize its principles." -- Stuart Halloway, Principal, The Halloway Group

"The book is an excellent collection of practical guidelines for COM programmers. The guidelines are explained well, making them easy to apply, and they provide solutions to a wide-range of problems COM developers often face. If you're a COM programmer, especially if you use C++, you'll want this book. It'll help you create better COM designs and help you write more efficient, more robust COM code. I highly recommend it." -- Ted Neff, Software Engineer, Hewlett-Packard

It is arguable that the tardiness showed by the industry in endorsing the COM message and investing in it has at least part of its motivations in the lack of explanatory and comprehensive documentation on the foundations (conceptual and implementative) of the model. Now that the primary hole has been more or less filled by a decent amount of quality literature, including most notably Essential COM, authored by one of the coauthors of this text and reviewed by DDJ's ERCB some months ago, many engineers in the industry are struggling to apply the newly digested paradigm to everyday software projects, often facing unexpected difficulties and uncertainties. The problem lies in the point I made earlier: Many developers have got in touch with COM/MTS and know its theory reasonably well, but they are stuck in the second part of the learning curve -- the one that extends from the theoretical knowledge up to the actual hands-on expertise, the one required to effectively build COM-based systems of nontrivial dimension.

The COM universe is so extremely vast and the paradigm shift so big that it is often very daunting to get acquainted and secure working with it, either as architectural designers or hardcore implementers.

When you find yourself in this situation, any reliable source of suggestions, proven guidelines, and exhaustive answers to recurring doubts would greatly help understand and overcome the many nontrivial issues. That's where Effective COM fits right in. The book can be thought of as a distilled dispenser of 50 rules-of-thumb and clearly explained guidelines stemming from the combined wisdom amassed by the four coauthors in many years of real-world experience and research. Read more--Davide Marcato, Dr. Dobb's Journal -- Dr. Dobb's Journal

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (December 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201379686
• ISBN-13: 978-0201379686
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,103,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weak, December 28, 1999

By 

DMDW "dmdw" (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-based Applications (Paperback)

Although useful for revision in certain aspects (e.g. threading issues) of such a rich subject the book is, on the whole, weak. It presents an overly simplistic discussion of the problems of dual interfaces (of which there are many) and a nauseating prosyletisation of the much flawed technology MTS. The section on COM security makes a decent attempt at improving the knowledge of the reader, but fails as the writing is obtuse and laboured.

Save your money, read the COM specification, and experiment. You'll gain a much deeper understanding than that speciously portrayed here.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The second book for any COM developer, March 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-based Applications (Paperback)

This is an outstanding summary of diverse COM design and implementation guidelines. This is the only source of information currently available for mastering COM development beyond the basics. The information is presented in extremely concise form making it worth more than ten times its 200 pages. This book is a must for any professional component designer (as any COM developer should be). While not exactly a sequel to "Essential COM", this is in fact the next book to be read. It probably wasn't the main goal of the authors, but their description of security is the most comprehensive ever written so far.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 50 Great Tips/Practices for COM Development, April 6, 1999

By 

Jason Bock ([e-mail]) (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Effective COM: 50 Ways to Improve Your COM and MTS-based Applications (Paperback)

From the general to the specific on topic ranging from MTS to security to IDL, this book contains a set of 50 guidelines that will help any COM developer. Even though the book uses C++ as its' primary language to demonstrate implementation examples, any COM developer will gain a lot by reading this book no matter what language(s) they use (see Item 9 for a great VB code snippet). I only wish the authors wouldn't have stopped at 50 guidelines! (I'll keep my eyes out for "Esoteric COM" ;) )

Jason