Mts Programming With Visual Basic [Paperback]

Scot Hillier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 1999

This book is intended to discuss architecture and implementation of true three-tier applications with MTS. The book will use both Visual Basic and Visual InterDev as development platforms but the emphasis is always on the VBA/VBScript language. The goal of this book is to help programmer's create applications that use a single set of business objects from both a thin web client and a thin Visual Basic client. The book is divided into four parts that encompass the user services, business services, and data services followed by a final complete project. The four parts of the book include the Data Services Layer, Business Services Layer, User Services Layer, and Project. Topics covered will include: Visual Basic Business Objects, COM/DCOM, Microsoft Transaction Server, Data Access with ADO, Transaction Server API, Transaction Processing, Creating Visual Basic front ends, Using Microsoft Transaction Server with IIS.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stressing hands-on development, MTS Programming with Visual Basic serves as a valuable introduction to using Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) for the enterprise developer. This book sets a new standard by providing over a dozen detailed hands-on exercises using Microsoft tools such as Visual Basic, MTS Explorer, and the Visual Modeler. (To understand distributed computing on the Microsoft platform, you'll need to combine these tools reliably.)

After looking at today's three-tiered architectures and MTS, author Scot Hillier examines Microsoft tools (such as SQL Server 7, IIS 4, and Visual Studio 98) that work together on the enterprise. After a simple exercise with Visual Modeler, Hillier covers MTS Explorer, which permits administration of MTS-enabled objects.

Next the author provides some tips for designing MTS components in Visual Basic (including the ObjectContext and threads). A useful hands-on exercise lets you build a simple MTS object. The book proceeds with coverage of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) for connecting to databases with MTS objects (including efficient "firehose" cursors). Subsequent chapters look at the advantages of polymorphism for VB class design, database transactions, and MTS security issues.

The book reviews Active Server Pages (ASP) basics to get you to the Internet and follows with information on deploying and debugging MTS-based applications (including an exercise with the Visual Studio Analyzer tool). After looking at the Windows Scripting Host and Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ), the book closes with an excellent case study for a three-tiered, browser-based ATM bank application. The exercise here walks through the design and implementation of this application using all relevant Microsoft tools. This sample alone can justify the cost of this excellent book, which provides a real-world introduction to enterprise development using MTS. --Richard Dragan

About the Author

Daniel Mezick is the Q&A columnist for VBPJ and has been teaching VB since 1993 for New Technology Solutions. He is the founder of the Connecticut VB Special Interest Group and a member of the Microsoft TECH-ED Advisory Council. He has taught thousands fo new VB developers. He serves as the Regional Director of Microsoft Developer Days in the Northeast region. Scot Hillier is the Microsoft Developer Days Regional Driector in Hartford, CT and the author of Inside VB Script. He has taught thousands of new VB developers at the VB Bootcamp seminar. Scot is a feature writer for VBPJ.

Product Details

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Sams Publishing (April 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672314258
• ISBN-13: 978-0672314254
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,837,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scot Hillier is an independent consultant and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional focused on creating solutions for Information Workers with SharePoint, Office, and related .NET technologies. He is the author of 10 books on Microsoft technologies including 'Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005'. When not writing about technology, Scot can be found presenting at industry conferences such as Microsoft Tech Ed and SharePoint Connections. Scot is a former U. S. Navy submarine officer and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Scot can be reached at [e-mail].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Should be subtitled "The Unauthoritative Solution", March 27, 2000

By 

Michael D. Long (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

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

A reference to the book and author appeared in the MTS newsgroups a couple of months back. The author of the post indicated that his company had followed the guidelines and ended up with issues related to scalability and performance.

This piqued my interest so I picked up a copy.

What I find is a book that is an easy read, but technically deficient. Both the sample source code provided and the body text of the book contain glaring errors that demonstrate a less than full understanding of MTS, DTC, and the behavior of COM in this environment.

The book is not suitable for advanced programmers because the code samples and material is beneath their level of expertise. Likewise, it is not appropriate for beginner to intermediate level programmers because they lack the skill and understanding of the technologies discussed to extract the valid information. Too much of the material sounds like it was written by a person in marketing or management; the lack of hands-on experience clearly shows.

If you are looking for a low-cost book on MTS programming, then this is it. However, if you accept the material as gospel and implement a system following the demonstrated coding techniques, then you will run into problems with both scalability and performance as the load on the middle-tier increases. The subsequent costs will be much greater than the cost of the book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars sloppy errors and misinformation, January 17, 2001

By 

Nate Smith (Maplewood, MN USA) - See all my reviews

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

When I bought this book, I jumped right in to Chapter 5. This chapter contains a high (relative to other technical books I've read) number of errors and misinformation.

In addition to code errors in the text, The author also doesn't bother to tell the reader about some VERY key bits of information.

For example, he states that adding a NewEnum method to a collection interface class "...ensures support for the For...Each syntax..." What he fails to add is that the Property ID of the procedure must be set to -4. Now if I hadn't known that already, I would be banging my head on my desk trying to figure out why some For..Each statement didn't enumerate items in my collection.

In discussing error handling in MTS objects, he offers two options. The first, he says, is to do nothing. "Unhandled runtime errors are normally passed from the component to the calling client with no work on your part." What? I thought unhandled errors would cause the code to terminate (and he states this later). Then he goes on to say that this option is not available in an MTS application. Well Mr. Hillier, you can "pass-the-buck" to the client by calling err.Raise in your component method's error handling code.

After reading one chapter of this book, I am weary of running across more mistakes and misinformation. Sams and Mr. Hillier, I buy books to answer these tough questions and my expectation is that the author is an expert on the topic AND can communicate effectively. In my opinion, this isn't the case in this book. To the unsuspecting reader this book will be helpful and seem to be authoritative. Buyer beware! I have to return this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, good for intermediate level., November 18, 1999

By A Customer

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

The book does provide useful information on using Mts, but it didn't really dealt deeply into the architecture of Mts such as threading management, or the technical interoperations of Mts behind its interfaces. However, I give this book credits for teaching you how to administer Mts environment, and how to incorporate components programming into Mts from an abstraction level of the syntaxing at most for a quick learning into Mts. I also want to mention that the book did included a small bonus section on MSMQ and MAPI, which it did not mentioned on its title. I would give this book one more star if the author did dealt more into this bonus section to make up for any lost point. Overall, it is not a bad book for a quick solution with Mts programming, and I would give it 3 and half star if I can.