Professional NT Services [Paperback]

Kevin Miller (Author), Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1998

At last! A programmer's guide to what goes on in the making of a robust and professional Service. With this book, Kevin teaches the developer how to design, implement and configure good NT services using C++ and COM (using ATL). It also sets a firm grounding for the configuration and security issues needed to develop a system service. By the end it will have presented several real-world, power examples that demonstrate important design principles. The book's development of usage patterns will be invaluable to client-server developers who want to include services as part of a multi-tiered system, for example, with IIS, as a business object broker, or as a backend to lightweight client development using DCOM.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This book is an absolute must for a number of reasons. Firstly it is a comprehensive guide to professional services design and development. Only some of the information contained is available by buying several, dated, competing titles. Professional NT Services also covers all the normal ground for coders including Registration, Security, Debugging, Admin - with special consideration given to new aspects seen in NT5. It also covers network programming, RPC and COM based Services. This is Service programming at 'professional' speeds from front to back.

About the Author

Kevin Miller works for Microsoft Corporation as a Consultant in the Southwest District MCS practice in Phoenix, Arizona. He is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, has an MBA in Technology Management, and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy. Kevin works with a variety of Fortune 500 clients, helping them to architect and develop systems using the latest Microsoft technologies. When he is not working, Kevin enjoys four wheeling and camping in the back hills of Arizona and Colorado, traveling, reading, and relaxing by the pool with his wife, Vicki, and dog, Jenny.

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861001304
• ISBN-13: 978-1861001306
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,145,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This one is really good., January 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional NT Services (Paperback)

It's hard to find someone these days who works with NT and is entirely unaware of NT services. There have been books treating the topic, there's some info and samples on MSDN, mag articles, and so on. Nevertheless, there have been two problems with all of it. First, all sources were treating services very narrowly, within a limited API-programming scope, and second--it was all over the place. This book imo successfully addresses both of these problems. It is most of what anyone would ever need on the topic, collected all in one place. Better yet, the author extends the coverage into lateral areas, from both the business and technological viewpoints. There's quite a bit on security, event-logging, COM and NT services interaction, MS message queue programming, ATL, debugging, profiling, and more. Quite a bit of that is useful even in its own right--services or not. You end up learning some, picking some suggestions, stealing code snippets from here and there... The book increases one's comfort not only with "hows" but also with "whys" of NT service programming. This may be the best book of the kind I've read lately.

Which is not to say that it's perfect. Some passages, especially at the beginning, are somewhat unreadable. For some reason, "role" is repeatedly spelled with the French accent... There's been a few rather touching cases of split infinitives-evasion that resulted in what J.K. Galbraith once called "fine examples of fiduciary prose" that "the conoisseurs will want to read backward as well as forward." But not much of it! Not much at all... While on a few occasions the author did start to slide into OO crypto-shamanism--there's a few "patterns" and "semantics" here and there--he clearly managed to regain control of himself--the patterns theme is used reasonably, and not in an altogether inappropriate context. What else? In a few places "persist" was used as a transitive verb, which is annoying. Anyway, that's nit-picking. Let's concentrate on positives: there wasn't a single "refactoring" in all of the book! Not a single "cool" either. The words "remote" and "migrate" weren't used as transitive verbs--a feat unheard of in the realm of MS stuff-related tech writing. In fact, "remote" wasn't even used as a verb at all. I repeat, this book is the cleanest of the ones I've seen lately. A word about Wrox: While many formerly-trustworthy publishers, like AW, have obviously given in to the temptation and engaged in large-scale consumer fraud by throwing oodles of nonsense, pseudo-scientific OO-puffery at the reader, Wrox seems to be quietly establishing itself on the level with O'Reilly. Good for them. Thanks to the author and the publisher.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of a kind, December 9, 2000

By 

Terris Linenbach "devguy" (Burlingame, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional NT Services (Paperback)

No other source compares to the quality and convenience of Professional NT Services, either in book form or on the Internet. The only other way to get this information is to read sample code on MSDN, which is a less-than-optimal way to learn the subject.

Professional NT Services describes the issues involved in writing services, such as security and threading, and provides sample code every step of the way. The book also details how to build a service with ATL and even tells you how to improve ATL's implementation. It even talks a bit about Microsoft Transaction Server (now part of COM+).

Here are three bits of information that I discovered elsewhere that I wish were more evident in the book -

1. If you create an ATL service, the default registation code registers the EXE as a COM server instead of a service -- run "myservice.exe -Service" to register the service.

2. The easiest way for multiple clients to be able to use a single COM instance that's housed in the service is to implement the COM class using DECLARE_CLASSFACTORY_SINGLETON. This is your typical "server" pattern.

3. Clients that want to connect to COM objects housed in the ervice should use CLSCTX_SERVER in CoCreateInstance

Perhaps this information is buried in the book somewhere, but I didn't find it. At any rate, without this book, I wouldn't have known where to start.

Finally, for all its great qualities, the book needs to be revised for Windows 2000. It mentions some new features of "NT5" but I wonder how accurate this information really is.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of its kind, January 13, 2001

By 

Marcelo Lombardi (Cordoba, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional NT Services (Paperback)

The book is comprehensive, clear, and easy to read. The source code works and it is easy to follow (the code is available on-line.) The discussion on ATL COM servers is truly enlightening and by itself worth the price of the book. If you are writing an ATL COM server this book is a must, especially if it will be a multi-threaded server.

From the beginning the author has the attitude that NT services are easy to understand and his "prophecy" becomes self-fulfilling throughout the book. The book is well organized and it pays special attention to service design and usage patterns.

Also notice that the book does not cover hardware drivers. By the way, do read the previous review titled "One of a kind" as it gives very useful tips on installing ATL services (using "myservice.exe -Service") and housing COM objects in a service; I have not found that information in the book.