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

The second section focuses on incorporating individual COM+ services, like transaction support, security, and asynchronous operations, into applications. The author concludes by discussing what you need to learn to transition to Microsoft's coming .NET framework. Regardless of what lies ahead for .NET, many distributed systems are being built today with COM+. COM+ Programming with Visual Basic focuses on topics relevant to distributed applications that are here to stay: There's simply no other documentation available for much of what's in COM+ Programming with Visual Basic. It's destined to be the resource behind the most robust, efficient, high-performance COM+ applications.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 4 Ratings

Misleading Title - This is NOT a VB/COM+ book - 2001-09-05
Reviewer Rating:
There is a big confusion in VB developer community regarding the relationship between COM and COM+. Books like this one have made the situation even worse. Like John Muller's "Visual Basic 6 COM+ Programming Bible", this book failed to address the fundamental COM+ features. COM+ is not just merely a renaming from MTS but rather a complete set of new system services collectively known as Component Services, including enhanced Transaction Services, Compensating Resource Manager, Queued Components, Lousely-Coupled Events, etc. Simply install a regular COM component in a COM+ application won't do anything better than installing it into a MTS package. Authors and/or publishers should be more responsible for the contents of their publications.

The following are some good VB/COM+ titles that I would recommend:
1. Scot Hillier's "COM+ Programming with Visual Basic" - this book covers both core COM+ services and high level Windows DNA architecture for developing distributed enterprise applications.
2. Peishu Li's "Visual Basic and COM+ Programming By Example" -this book is probably the best VB/COM+ programming title available today. It covers all the important COM+ services in the context of VB sample code with detailed explanations. Although marked as for Beginner to Immediate, this book really suites the needs for VB developers of all levels.

Not the most practical (especially at this moment in time) - 2001-11-02
Reviewer Rating:
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.++

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'.

Great Book! - 2001-07-12
Reviewer Rating:
After having read and used Scott Hillier's COM+ book for the last year, I've finally found the perfect book to explain the parts Scott skipped. As the preface says, if you are not interested in HOW COM+ works, then get another book. If you are looking for cookie cutter code, get another book. This book explains in good detail how COM+ (and COM and MTS for that matter) works internally. It points out many mistakes VB programmers make in working with COM+, why they are made and how to overcome them. And it is very easy to read, especially if you are moderately familiar with the topics. I just got the book last night and I already love it.

O'Reilly does it again!

A VB book with internals info - 2001-11-07
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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