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.

Rating:

Rating:

Rating:

COM+ Programming with Visual Basic Review,  October 12 2001
Submitted by Bernd Bucher   [Respond | View]

The autor updated the security chapter in the examples file but the new example is just pure Windows API Programming stuff...the examples are still a disappointment. The book itself is a mix between in-depth behind the scene explanation and examples not in-depth at all.


COM+ Programming with Visual Basic Review,  October 04 2001
Submitted by Bernd Bucher   [Respond | View]

The book offers a very good insight to COM+ BUT it's not perfect at all. Especially the Examples delivered with the book have a poor quality. If you download the Examples you only get the sample code until chapter 9. So, the whole security part where I got the most problems is missing any sample code. This means you can't just deploy a running sample. Especially the security took me many hours to get along with.




COM+ Programming with Visual Basic Review,  August 16 2001
Submitted by Stephen Rybacki   [Respond | View]

Finally! This book cuts through to the COM/COM+ core where others have only come tantalizingly close. I have an extensive computer science library, and I thought I had all the definitive books on Visual Basic 5/6 and object oriented programming in VB. Yet this exceedingly handy volume is already my favorite because I am a person who just HAS to know "how it works". While other books largely defer to Visual Basic's sheltering from system internals, this one gives the straight up story on the hows and whys of interface based programming. Don't get me wrong, quality authors like Daniel Appleman and Deborah Kurata and the content they have provided are excellent sources of information for Visual Basic object oriented programming, but COM+ Programming by Jose Mojica picks up where these leave off. For those who don't really want or need to know these sorts of things this book might be too much, but as for me, I am on the same page as the author -- I have to know the how and why of it all. I have always been a fan of O'Reilly books because of their treatment of subjects that are off the beaten track and this one does not disappoint. Well done.

See larger cover