Customer Reviews

Mts Programming With Visual Basic

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I strongly recommend this book to any developers that are planning on, or have already started writing any distributed apps with VB6 and MTS. The book includes clear and concise examples and many design techniques from which you may choose.

The book also explains many advanced OO techniques and how they pertain to developing distributed apps. The book gives several different ways to implement a distributed app that is very helpful and allows the reader to choose what method is best for their situation.

After reading and doing the examples you will have a strong understanding of how to write distributed apps with VB6 and MTS as well as knowledge of MSMQ and IIS as it pertains to writing distributed apps.

A must have if you plan on writing Distributed Apps.

This book will give you real insight about MTS and its architecture. Excellent book that will take you from the ground to a level where you'll fell yourself to be an advanced programmer for distributed architecture. I personally think that this book is extremely useful for distributed exam of VB(MCSD). Go for it....

This volume guides you step-by-step through the construction and implementation of MTS components built for various purposes. The book never delves too deeply into "black-belt" programming as indicated by the author, but it does go deep enough for you to immediately implement what you have learned.

By focusing more on illustrations and examples (a few minor flaws exist), you get good practical, hands-on experience. It also covers the utilization of MTS under various scenarios. Not everyone will agree with the architecture proposed (that, of course, will never happen anywhere), but if you are not at least a "brown-belt" MTS programmer, you will benefit greatly from this book.

I think it might have been better had some of the examples been cumulative (over several chapters) and built a larger project where you could have seen it all fit together. But the examples are well-written and not too tedious or time-consuming to complete.

Even with the annoying typos, this book is worth every penny, if only for the instructions on debugging com objects

This book is perfectly written for the working programmer (especially if you're working in the Microsoft universe!). Mr. Hillier clearly explains the purpose and current state of Transaction Server, and provides clear, useful coding examples showing appropriate uses for it. I can't recommend it highly enough. Congratulations to author, editor, and publisher for their public service.

This book is a winner. It fills a big void when it comes to real world MTS-, VB6-, based distributed application development.

I found myself not allways agreeing with his oo decisions or techniques but always respecting them. I got a lot out of this book, especially for the price. I recommend it to all who need guidance with these types of applications. I've read VB6 Business Objects, MTS & MSMQ, Developing ActiveX Components, Doing Objects, Mastering Series, etc, which are all great. However, this book fills a gap. Scot puts himself on the line with a real world architecture.

Additionally, the MTS reference alone is worth the price.

Great job!

This is a practical book in the real world. The Examples are very practical and simple to understand.I like the author coz he gives many good advices and opinion that are practical in development world.