COM+ Programming With Visual Basic [Paperback]

Jose Mojica (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2001

The importance of a book like COM+ Programming with Visual Basic lies in the fact that the Visual Basic programming environment is designed to hide as many low-level system details as possible. While this approach can speed development time by letting you focus on the task at hand, it actually hinders the process when it obscures details you need to understand or control. Such is often the case for programmers who are developing components that take advantage of COM+ services. COM+ Programming with Visual Basic takes aim squarely at the information needs of these developers.

For instance, despite the marketing hype about COM+ as the new and improved version of COM, classic COM is very much the foundation on which COM+ is built: COM+ components are a particular kind of COM component. Visual Basic hides almost all COM implementation details; yet it is precisely in the area of COM+ programming that these hidden details are most important. Therefore, we've devoted significant content to exploring COM internals:

• Interface-based programming
• How COM interfaces work internally
• How COM components are activated
• How versioning COM components works in Visual Basic

The second section focuses on incorporating individual COM+ services, like transaction support, security, and asynchronous operations, into applications. The author concludes by discussing what you need to learn to transition to Microsoft's coming .NET framework.

Regardless of what lies ahead for .NET, many distributed systems are being built today with COM+. COM+ Programming with Visual Basic focuses on topics relevant to distributed applications that are here to stay:

• How to use interfaces
• Passing objects by reference or by value
• What it means to have multithreaded applications
• How declarative programming works
• How to program within a distributed transaction
• How to add role-based security to applications

There's simply no other documentation available for much of what's in COM+ Programming with Visual Basic. It's destined to be the resource behind the most robust, efficient, high-performance COM+ applications.

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

In response to some comments, I wanted to clarify that my book, COM+ Programming with Visual Basic, is not really about the COM+ services. For a book on the services themselves, I suggest Juval Lowy’s COM and .NET Component Services (O’Reilly).

In my book, I did not try to address every feature in COM+ -- there are a lot of books out there that already do that. I feel the real need is for VB developers to understand how things really work inside. My book is an internals book. First, I show an internal view of the COM architecture from the side of the VB compiler and then I show an internal view of the core COM+ architecture. Following this, I show an internal view of what I considered the essential COM+ services. To finish, I give an introduction to .NET and VB.NET.

So I guess a more fitting title is "How COM+ Works Internally." But now a word of caution... Like I say in the book’s introduction and like the other reviewer noted, if you do not want to know the low level details, stay away. If you are tired of C++ developers claiming to know more than us VB'ers about COM/COM+ then this is the book to get.

About the Author

Jose Mojica is an instructor and researcher at DevelopMentor, a company that's gained an international reputation for its experience with COM and COM+. He teaches various courses that focus on enterprise development in COM+, IIS, .NET, and Visual Basic. Before joining DevelopMentor, Jose was a consultant at IBM, writing DCOM servers that performed speech recognition and creating ActiveX controls in ATL for the ViaVoice SDK. He has worked with Visual Basic since Version 1.0. Jose is the author of Building ActiveX Controls with Visual Basic 5.0 and coauthor of Programming Internet Controls and Distributed Applications for Visual C++ 6.0 MCSD Training Kit.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565928407
• ISBN-13: 978-1565928404
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,255,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Misleading Title - This is NOT a VB/COM+ book, September 5, 2001

By 

Jeffery Ford (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: COM+ Programming With Visual Basic (Paperback)

There is a big confusion in VB developer community regarding the relationship between COM and COM+. Books like this one have made the situation even worse. Like John Muller's "Visual Basic 6 COM+ Programming Bible", this book failed to address the fundamental COM+ features. COM+ is not just merely a renaming from MTS but rather a complete set of new system services collectively known as Component Services, including enhanced Transaction Services, Compensating Resource Manager, Queued Components, Lousely-Coupled Events, etc. Simply install a regular COM component in a COM+ application won't do anything better than installing it into a MTS package. Authors and/or publishers should be more responsible for the contents of their publications.

The following are some good VB/COM+ titles that I would recommend:
1. Scot Hillier's "COM+ Programming with Visual Basic" - this book covers both core COM+ services and high level Windows DNA architecture for developing distributed enterprise applications.
2. Peishu Li's "Visual Basic and COM+ Programming By Example" -this book is probably the best VB/COM+ programming title available today. It covers all the important COM+ services in the context of VB sample code with detailed explanations. Although marked as for Beginner to Immediate, this book really suites the needs for VB developers of all levels.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the most practical (especially at this moment in time), November 2, 2001

By 

Daniel Moth (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: COM+ Programming With Visual Basic (Paperback)

Jose Mojica sets out at the beginning by saying that this is not a `cookbook', that readers are expected to be familiar with the technology already and that the goal is to look at the architecture behind terms such as COM, COM+, MTS and DCOM; the real goal is to learn exactly how the technology works under the bonnet.

The book is broadly split into 3 sections: COM, COM+ and .NET. The latter only gets a chapter and is really just an introduction, although a good one at that. The COM section includes 5 chapters looking at interfaces, in- and out-of-process server activation and the infamous COM versioning scheme. COM+ spans 4 chapters and while not all services are described, transactional components and COM+ security are thoroughly covered as well as writing and debugging COM+ components in VB. 

The author overdoes it by telling us what he is going to tell us, then telling us, and then telling us what he told us. Apart from the repetition though, his writing is fairly easy to follow and it is evident that he has a deep technical understanding of the topics covered.

Why read this book now that .NET is announced and is on its way? Well, it is probably going to be a couple of years before service pack 1 for the .NET release and until then there is still a lot of COM(+) code to be written. Even so, do we really need to know to such a detail how the technology works behind the scenes in order to use it effectively from within VB? This is not the place to answer that question, but if you think the answer is `yes' and you work with Microsoft technologies, then you will enjoy reading `COM+ Programming with Visual Basic'.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!, July 12, 2001

By 

samkc (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: COM+ Programming With Visual Basic (Paperback)

After having read and used Scott Hillier's COM+ book for the last year, I've finally found the perfect book to explain the parts Scott skipped. As the preface says, if you are not interested in HOW COM+ works, then get another book. If you are looking for cookie cutter code, get another book. This book explains in good detail how COM+ (and COM and MTS for that matter) works internally. It points out many mistakes VB programmers make in working with COM+, why they are made and how to overcome them. And it is very easy to read, especially if you are moderately familiar with the topics. I just got the book last night and I already love it.

O'Reilly does it again!