Professional NT Services

The book is comprehensive, clear, and easy to read. The source code works and it is easy to follow (the code is available on-line.) The discussion on ATL COM servers is truly enlightening and by itself worth the price of the book. If you are writing an ATL COM server this book is a must, especially if it will be a multi-threaded server.From the beginning the author has the attitude that NT services are easy to understand and his "prophecy" becomes self-fulfilling throughout the book. The book is well organized and it pays special attention to service design and usage patterns. Also notice that the book does not cover hardware drivers. By the way, do read the previous review titled "One of a kind" as it gives very useful tips on installing ATL services (using "myservice.exe -Service") and housing COM objects in a service; I have not found that information in the book.

This book addresses all the issues related to such complex problems as NT Services. The author explains them in very great details, and makes you understand how all this works. The sample code works and you can use the classes from the book to start coding NT Services very fast. The author is very talented in explaining difficult concepts. Funny enough, this book has the best explanation on MSMQ, as well as apartments. As an alternative to the classes provided in this book, I recommend the CodeGuru NT Service C++ wizard written by Joerg Koenig. But even with a wizard, it is good to know how all this works.

This is the kind of book you don't want to put down until you've read it cover to cover. And then you start writing your own services using some of the best example code (starter code, really) and base classes I've ever seen in a book. It's a complete 'how to' and 'why' reference manual, targeted at developers who know C++ and Windows but not Services.

Knowledgeable and complete explanation of importance and use of NT services. Every "How" has concise and understandable "Why". Chapter about NT security, general tips for multithreaded design, MSMQ, ..., a lot of extra staff. Elegant C++ classes for every aspect of NT service development - immediately reusable. Worth every penny you'll pay for this book.

It's hard to find someone these days who works with NT and is entirely unaware of NT services. There have been books treating the topic, there's some info and samples on MSDN, mag articles, and so on. Nevertheless, there have been two problems with all of it. First, all sources were treating services very narrowly, within a limited API-programming scope, and second--it was all over the place. This book imo successfully addresses both of these problems. It is most of what anyone would ever need on the topic, collected all in one place. Better yet, the author extends the coverage into lateral areas, from both the business and technological viewpoints. There's quite a bit on security, event-logging, COM and NT services interaction, MS message queue programming, ATL, debugging, profiling, and more. Quite a bit of that is useful even in its own right--services or not. You end up learning some, picking some suggestions, stealing code snippets from here and there... The book increases one's comfort not only with "hows" but also with "whys" of NT service programming. This may be the best book of the kind I've read lately. Which is not to say that it's perfect. Some passages, especially at the beginning, are somewhat unreadable. For some reason, "role" is repeatedly spelled with the French accent... There's been a few rather touching cases of split infinitives-evasion that resulted in what J.K. Galbraith once called "fine examples of fiduciary prose" that "the conoisseurs will want to read backward as well as forward." But not much of it! Not much at all... While on a few occasions the author did start to slide into OO crypto-shamanism--there's a few "patterns" and "semantics" here and there--he clearly managed to regain control of himself--the patterns theme is used reasonably, and not in an altogether inappropriate context. What else? In a few places "persist" was used as a transitive verb, which is annoying. Anyway, that's nit-picking. Let's concentrate on positives: there wasn't a single "refactoring" in all of the book! Not a single "cool" either. The words "remote" and "migrate" weren't used as transitive verbs--a feat unheard of in the realm of MS stuff-related tech writing. In fact, "remote" wasn't even used as a verb at all. I repeat, this book is the cleanest of the ones I've seen lately. A word about Wrox: While many formerly-trustworthy publishers, like AW, have obviously given in to the temptation and engaged in large-scale consumer fraud by throwing oodles of nonsense, pseudo-scientific OO-puffery at the reader, Wrox seems to be quietly establishing itself on the level with O'Reilly. Good for them. Thanks to the author and the publisher.