COM and .NET Component Services (O'Reilly Windows) (Paperback)

~ Juval Löwy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Aimed at the more experienced developer or Windows administrator responsible for deployment, COM and .NET Component Services provides an expert guide to getting the most out of COM+ services on the Windows 2000/XP platform, including material on the new .NET platform. This guide will help you create state-of-the-art, scalable Windows components that take full advantage of transactions, object pooling, and powerful administrative features available in COM+.

While Microsoft is about to replace COM components with the new .NET standard, COM+ is still a viable technology and will be fully supported (and even enhanced) in the new .NET Framework. Much of COM and .NET Component Services concentrates on C++ and Visual Basic examples that explore areas of functionality, plus practical tips for configuring and administering components with such tools as the COM+ Services Explorer.

The expert perspective here will help you design components that work with COM+ effectively. There is plenty of background material on COM+ topics like marshaling and interception, which allow objects to be pooled behind the scenes on the Windows platform. But the focus is on the real APIs and programming techniques developers need to work with COM+. This practical focus extends to specific suggestions and pitfalls to avoid for each area of COM+ development. There is good material on COM+ transactions here, along with some excellent material on asynchronous components that tap COM+ queuing capabilities.

The book concludes with a long chapter on .NET, which brings this title current with Microsoft's new programming platform. The author recaps the APIs covered earlier in the book using .NET and C#. (COM+ is still a part of .NET, but you'll use a different set of APIs and programming language to work with it.) The book concludes with a glance at new COM+ 1.5 features, plus a quick introduction to .NET.

In all, this title strikes a good balance between the old and the new. After reading this smart and fast-moving text, developers will be able to immediately learn COM+ skills that will have practical benefit for both current and future Windows software. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Overview on COM+ Components (features and basic deployment), COM+ contexts (marshaling and interception), COM+ instance management, object pooling, just-in-time activation (JITA), COM+ transactions, transaction basics, compensating transactions, two-phase commits and voting, apartments and concurrency, activities, the neutral threading apartment, APIs for manipulating the COM+ catalog, security (roles, programmatic security and pitfalls), queued components (synchronous and asynchronous components), COM+ events and the Event Service (filtering, distributed and asynchronous events), sample code in C++ (and Visual Basic 6), .NET serviced components, .NET packages and APIs for COM+ development, introduction to COM+ 1.5 and the .NET Framework, and administration and programming hints for COM+.

Review

"This is a book I can see myself referring to during active development so I'd recommend it to programmers." - Paul Whitehead, Cvu, June 2002

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596001037
• ISBN-13: 978-0596001032
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #926,705 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #21 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > APIs & Operating Environments > COM, DCOM & ATL
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Coverage of COM+, October 25, 2001

By	Robert P. Sedor (Shelton, CT USA) - See all my reviews

If anyone thinks that COM+ is going away, they are misguided. .NET will still rely on all of the infrastructure for transactional applications that COM+ provides.
Lowy has provided an excellent explanation of COM+ and its architecture and then how .NET will fit in. The chapter on XP is also excellent. Anyone who reads this book could definitely put it in the category of blend between Pattison's ease of reading and Ewald's technical explanations.
All of the code is in ATL 7.0, and although that isn't any really big leap from ATL 3.0, the environment does take some getting used to.
Additionally, the Logger project in Appendix A is worth the price of the book.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book!, October 24, 2001

By A Customer

Come on, techies like us know that .NET uses COM+ to provide the Component services like Transaction Management, Queued components and the like. Hence it is natural that COM+ be covered first in detail. Then the author explains how to use it from .NET components. Very well laid out. Buy this book!

20 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing explanations of COM+ Services, December 7, 2001

By	Jeff Jorczak (Manchester, CT USA) - See all my reviews

I have read several books now on COM+ and MTS before it, and I have never quite understood how everything ties together and works together. So I have been stumbling in the dark on this for years. My components work, but I never knew if they worked optimally.

This book changed all that. Finally, it all makes sense. This is by far the best book on this subject that I have read. Every piece of COM+ is explained clearly and with enough detail to get the point across without bogging down the reader. It even answered some difficult mysteries for me such as "Why is the JITA checkbox greyed out for my transactional components?" I couldn't even find an answer for that one on the newsgroups.

The .NET coverage is brief and was probably an afterthought (in that it appears in a chapter at the end rather than integrated throughout the book), but it is enough to get started. I am looking forward to a second edition of this book that focuses on .NET and has all the code examples in C#. Juval, please write that!