Com & .Net Component Services: Mastering COM+ Services

I have read several books now on COM+ and MTS before it, and I have never quite understood how everything ties together and works together. So I have been stumbling in the dark on this for years. My components work, but I never knew if they worked optimally. This book changed all that. Finally, it all makes sense. This is by far the best book on this subject that I have read. Every piece of COM+ is explained clearly and with enough detail to get the point across without bogging down the reader. It even answered some difficult mysteries for me such as "Why is the JITA checkbox greyed out for my transactional components?" I couldn't even find an answer for that one on the newsgroups.The .NET coverage is brief and was probably an afterthought (in that it appears in a chapter at the end rather than integrated throughout the book), but it is enough to get started. I am looking forward to a second edition of this book that focuses on .NET and has all the code examples in C#. Juval, please write that!

This is one of the best technical books, I have read. It assumes knowledge of COM and object-oriented technologies. The clarity in the areas COM+ interception, threading, security, transaction handling is exceptional.

More than just a how-to book, this book clearly explains the fundamental concepts behind component-based distributed development, and provides an appreciation for why a component infrastructure like COM+ is a God-send to COM and .NET component developers.In addition to describing COM+ features and their use, from developer and administrative perspectives, Lowy provides motivation to take advantage of COM+ features by presenting relevant real-world examples. Furthermore, Lowy points out common pitfalls that can be encountered when dealing with each COM+ feature. The techniques described for avoiding some of these pitfalls are alone worth more than the price of the book.All key COM+ concepts and technologies are thoroughly covered. Included in the book are chapters on: object context, instance management, transactions, concurrency, the COM+ catalog, security, queued components, events, and COM+ component services as they apply to .NET, where COM+ component services (called Enterprise Services in .NET) are just as critical to successful enterprise application development. The appendices provide a useful log component, as well as a preview of Microsoft's next release of COM+.

Come on, techies like us know that .NET uses COM+ to provide the Component services like Transaction Management, Queued components and the like. Hence it is natural that COM+ be covered first in detail. Then the author explains how to use it from .NET components. Very well laid out. Buy this book!

If anyone thinks that COM+ is going away, they are misguided. .NET will still rely on all of the infrastructure for transactional applications that COM+ provides.Lowy has provided an excellent explanation of COM+ and its architecture and then how .NET will fit in. The chapter on XP is also excellent. Anyone who reads this book could definitely put it in the category of blend between Pattison's ease of reading and Ewald's technical explanations.All of the code is in ATL 7.0, and although that isn't any really big leap from ATL 3.0, the environment does take some getting used to. Additionally, the Logger project in Appendix A is worth the price of the book.