ISBN:1565928407Book Description
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
- 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
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
A VB book with internals info
If you think that VB is not synonymous with only point and click, drag and drop, then this book is for you. The book covers COM, COM+ and ends with an introduction to VB.NET. Mr Mojica covers the first two topics at a level of detail that is usually skipped (to the reader's detriment) in cookbook-style books.
Although this book may not be for everyone, some of us are interested in how COM and COM+ work behind the scenes, and want more depth out of a book than one could get by reading the documentation and working the SDK examples. This is that book.
Not the most practical (especially at this moment in time)
Jose Mojica sets out at the beginning by saying that this is not a `cookbook', that readers are expected to be familiar with the technology already and that the goal is to look at the architecture behind terms such as COM, COM+, MTS and DCOM; the real goal is to learn exactly how the technology works under the bonnet.
The book is broadly split into 3 sections: COM, COM+ and .NET. The latter only gets a chapter and is really just an introduction, although a good one at that. The COM section includes 5 chapters looking at interfaces, in- and out-of-process server activation and the infamous COM versioning scheme. COM+ spans 4 chapters and while not all services are described, transactional components and COM+ security are thoroughly covered as well as writing and debugging COM+ components in VB.Â
The author overdoes it by telling us what he is going to tell us, then telling us, and then telling us what he told us. Apart from the repetition though, his writing is fairly easy to follow and it is evident that he has a deep technical understanding of the topics covered.
Why read this book now that .NET is announced and is on its way? Well, it is probably going to be a couple of years before service pack 1 for the .NET release and until then there is still a lot of COM(+) code to be written. Even so, do we really need to know to such a detail how the technology works behind the scenes in order to use it effectively from within VB? This is not the place to answer that question, but if you think the answer is `yes' and you work with Microsoft technologies, then you will enjoy reading `COM+ Programming with Visual Basic'.