COM & .NET Component Services

Activities: The COM+ Innovation

The task for COM+ was not only to solve the classic OOP problems but also to address the classic COM concurrency model deficiencies and maintain backward compatibility. Imagine a client calling a method on a component. The component can be in the same context as the client, in another apartment or a process on the same machine, or in a process on another machine. The called component may in turn call other components, and so on, creating a string of nested calls. Even though you cannot point to a single thread that carries out the calls, the components involved do share a logical thread of execution.

Despite the fact that the logical thread can span multiple threads, processes, and machines, there is only one root client. There is also only one thread at a time executing in the logical thread, but not necessarily the same physical thread at all times.

The idea behind the COM+ concurrency model is simple, but powerful: instead of achieving synchronization through physical thread affinity, COM+ achieves synchronization through logical thread affinity. Because in a logical thread there is just one physical thread executing in any given point in time, logical thread affinity implies physical threads synchronization as well. If a component is guaranteed not to be accessed by multiple logical threads at the same time, then synchronization to that component is guaranteed. Note that there is no need to guarantee that a component is always accessed by the ...