COM & .NET Component Services

Registering Assemblies

To add the serviced components in your assembly to a COM+ application, you need to register that assembly with COM+. You can perform that registration in three ways:

• Manually, using a command line utility called RegSvcs.exe.

• Dynamically, by having the client program register your assembly automatically.

• Programmatically, by writing code that does the registration for you using a utility class provided by .NET.

Regardless of the technique you use, the registration process adds your serviced components to a COM+ application and configures them according to the default COM+ settings or according to their attributes (if present in the code). If the assembly contains incompatible attributes, the incompatibility is detected during registration and the registration is aborted. Future versions of the .NET compilers may detect incompatibilities during compilation time.

Signing Assembly and Assembly Location

To add an assembly to a COM+ application, the assembly must be signed (have a strong name) so the assembly resolver can map a client activation request to the corresponding assembly. Although in theory you need not install the assembly in the global assembly cache (GAC), in practice you should install it because the assembly DLL must be in a known location—either the system directory (for server applications that run in DllHost) or the hosting client process directory (if the client is not a COM+ server application). The other known location that the assembly ...