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 allowing the developer to focus on the
task at hand, it actually hinders the process when it
obscures details the developer needs 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 developers 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
withVisual 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.
Contents
- Preface
- COM+ Internals
- Interface-Based Programming
- How Interfaces Work Internally
- In-Process Servers
- Out-of-Process Servers and COM's Remoting
Architecture
- Versioning
- COM+ Applications
- Writing and Debugging COM+ Code
- Transaction Services
- COM+Security
- Introduction to .NET
- Summary
- Index