Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576104095 ISBN 13: 9781576104095

Publisher: Coriolis Group, 1999

Wallace, a multi-platform programmer who has turned his knowledge recently toward writing technical manuals, has addressed this book to active programmers who are new to Component Object Model Programming (COM). The book covers how to: create any type of COM server; design COM elements in ATL, MFC, Visual J++ 6, and Visual Basic; and develop Active Server Pages components and Microsoft Transaction Server components on all four platforms. The enclosed CD-ROM includes applications that help in designing Web sites, as well as source code for the book's projects. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Review:

Nathan Wallace's COM/DCOM Blue Book provides an excellent guide to the Component Object Model (COM) development using today's Microsoft tools, from the Active Template Library (ATL) and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) in Visual C++ to Visual Basic and Visual J++. Alternating chapters in this book feature either tools-based programming exercises (using ATL, MFC, VB, and Visual J++) or explanations of the technical details underlying COM's many attributes and functions.

After showing off basic COM projects, the author presents a short history of COM and its elemental pieces such as interfaces, reference counting, containment, and aggregation. The book also spotlights coding with object linking and embedding (OLE) Automation, including an early example of a simple COM server for encrypting string data, a sample that's just right for demonstrating essential COM principles.

COM/DCOM then looks at ActiveX controls; shows off properties (and property pages), event handling, and persistence; and discusses distributed COM (DCOM) with examples that show how to run COM servers from remote clients.

The best sections of the book cover the COM Variant data-type, Strings (or BSTRs), and the SAFEARRAY data type in all four programming environments. The book does a fine job of explaining these essential COM topics. Later sections glance at Internet programming (with ASP and dynamic HTML [DHTML] support in each tool). More in-depth coverage of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) comes at the end of the book (though the final chapter repeats whole paragraphs from an earlier section verbatim--obviously an editorial glitch).

Overall, this book is a perfect choice for developers who want to take their COM skills to the next level. It demystifies many of the trickier aspects of COM using concise examples from each of Microsoft's major COM development tools. --Richard Dragan

About the Author:

Nathan Wallace (Lakewood, CO) has been a software developer for Windows NT since version 3.51 and has been a best-selling computer book author since 1995, with over fifteen books in print and more than 100,000 copies sold. He is a Microsoft Sitebuilder Network Level 2 member specializing in COM+ programming, and participated in the Windows 2000 beta program from its inception.