Customer Reviews

Professional Visual C++ MTS Programming

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

 

 

This book is at the serious end of the spectrum of titles available from Wrox but I was still left a little disappointed.

For once I found a Wrox book that needs more pages. For example I was astonished that the author makes no reference to IIS, surely hanging transactional components off IIS web pages is the major MTS entry point for most developers today!

Dr. Grimes, MTS under IIS deserves at least a full chapter in the next revision of this book.

The chapters on debugging (+tracing tools) and COM+ were the most valuable for me.

I suppose equivalent material to that in this book is available on msdn.Microsoft.com somewhere, but Microsoft only seem capable of writing technical material for VB programmers these days. So if you are writing server-side C++ COM code you need this book despite its limitations.

In my Star awards system 5 Stars is reserved for great software engineering books that have an expected shelf life of 5 yeas plus (I have not read such a book from Wrox), 4 Stars go to well researched books covering hot software technology, so this book only deserves 3 stars because of the omissions.

This book has a good amount of info on how MTS works and some of the things to keep in mind when developing for MTS in C++. However, it has vary little programming! There are few applicable examples. This book has lots of theory with little practice. You will not learn how to develop C++ for MTS with this book, but you will understand how MTS works.

I've worked with MTS for a while now, and I know how it works pretty well. I love technical details, and this is precisly what this book gives you: low level descriptions of how MTS performs its magic using interception etc.

This book doesn't tell you how to write your middle tier applications as such, but it gives you all the basic technical information and guidelines you need to be successful with MTS.

Overall I'd highly recommended this book. If you've got other MTS books, I can assure you this book is still a must have. It is the "Essential MTS" book Don Box would have written if he had the time ( probably ;) ).

The MTS 3.0 implementations under the Windows 2000 are still the same ( a few name changes), so the book isn't out of date, and you'll find the last chapter discusses W2K details anyway.

Enjoy.

This badly written book goes into various details without explaining concepts. It does not talk about desgining transactional applications. It is random collection of thoughts on narrow issues. This style is typical of the author.

This is definetly not in the class of "Essential COM" as some other reviews would have you believe.

Note to Grimes: Please read books by Box, Petzold, RIchter, Scott Meyers,Lippman, Rockind to get an idea on how to communicate technical information.

The author tries to span the universe in just one dance - the results are well known: the book is not an ultimate reference for developer. Nor it is a simple and concise reading. It contains too many silly screen shots with MTS Console of other GUI screen or table of MTS event codes - stuff for beginners. The book is really hard to read although it contains the knowledge. The downloadable code samples are disappoining. As a product it is somewhat raw/inmature (like all appservers themselves!). If Don Box's "Essential COM" is five stars, this one, with its current ambitious title is two or less.

This book easily provides the most detailed review of how MTS works internally. In addition, it is one of the few books that looks at MTS from a C++ (rather than a VB) programmer's viewpoint. The last chapter on COM+ provides a great preview on how MTS will be integrated and extended within Windows 2000. This book is a must-have for everyone who has done some MTS work and now wants to understand how MTS really works.

The book is valuable for anyone interested in MTS, but don't expect it to guide you through practical aspects of designing MTS components using Visual C++ (and this is what the title says). Don't get me wrong - I hate books just showing various wizard dialogs, but if the book's title includes words "programming" and "Visual C++", then the author should give more practical details. I also found unnecessary some generic COM topics - it's not a book for beginners, and there's no reason to explain what type library does. Overall, I found that the book explain quite a lot about MTS internal architecture, but it needs better structure, more info about MTS applications (including IIS), and less words about what COM is about (we all know that COM is about love :-)).

I've just in the middle of reading of this book. It's really cool. This book explain MTS and COM+ differences, explaine why and how implemented in MTS + a lot of different techical suggestions. Try to use it with ATL Internals

I found this book very usefull. Most of all it covers several tricky MTS questions, like hidden interfaces that you wont find in the MSDN. It looks like author spend a lot of time going deeper and deeper incide COM+ architecture, and now shares his knowledge and experience.

I found that I learn more from MSDN and its samples than reading this book in writting MTS components using vc++. I appreciate that MTS and COM are very difficult subjects to cover especially when you try to go going to the nuts and bolts of it. The most difficult bit about this book i found is that the more i read the more i found myself confused and should i said 'scared' of COM and MTS. I suggest the author should restructure the book so that it is more 'reader friendly'. A good example would be 'Atl Internals'.