COM+ Programming with Visual Basic: Developing COM+ Servers with COM, COM+, and .NET

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 letting you focus on the task at hand, it actually hinders the process when it obscures details you need 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 you 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 with Visual 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.

Jose Mojica is an instructor and researcher at DevelopMentor, a company that's gained an international reputation for its experience with COM and COM+. He teaches various courses that focus on enterprise development in COM+, IIS, .NET, and Visual Basic. Before joining DevelopMentor, Jose was a consultant at IBM, writing DCOM servers that performed speech recognition and creating ActiveX controls in ATL for the ViaVoice SDK. He has worked with Visual Basic since Version 1.0. Jose is the author of Building ActiveX Controls with Visual Basic 5.0 and coauthor of Programming Internet Controls and Distributed Applications for Visual C++ 6.0 MCSD Training Kit.