Press Release
October 29, 2001
COM+ Can be the Migration Path to .NET, Says O'Reilly Author
Sebastopol, CA--Component-oriented development is a natural choice for
building scalable, robust applications, especially large-scale
enterprise applications. Developers know that by breaking a large
system down into smaller units, they can write code that's easier to
reuse on other projects, easier to distribute across multiple
computers, and easier to maintain. For components that run on Windows
machines, the standard is COM, or the Microsoft Component Object
Model.
The problem many developers faced in the early days of component
development was that they would spend more of their time dealing with
connectivity issues and managing the component environment than they
would designing the components. As Juval Lowy, author of COM and .NET
Component Services (O'Reilly, US $39.95) explains, "Developers still
manage many aspects of their applications, such as object instances,
transactions, concurrency, security, asynchronous calls, disconnected
work, publishing and subscribing to events. These connectivity or
'plumbing' issues have almost nothing to do with the functionality that
customers are paying for, and yet developers spend as much as 80% of
their time on 'plumbing' (and sometimes as high as 95%), instead of
adding business value to their applications. Not only that, but the
majority of the bugs--and the time spent fixing them--are usually
traced back to connectivity and plumbing defects, not to the business
problem addressed by the application."
When COM was first introduced by Microsoft, it solved a number of
problems facing early component developers by providing a binary
standard for components, defining a communication interface, and
providing a way to link components dynamically. The latest suite of
component services, called COM+ component services, or Enterprise
Services on the .NET platform, includes many new supporting services
and added functionality. As Lowy says, "COM and .NET Enterprise Services
can basically take care and manage all the connectivity and 'plumbing'
aspects of the application, and let the developers focus on
implementing the business logic. They not only gain productivity and
faster time to market, but also quality because Microsoft has done an
excellent job in implementing these services, both in robustness and in
performance."
The current shift from Windows and COM-based applications to .NET makes
learning the use of COM+ services even more important, says Lowy. He
explains, "Both COM and .NET rely on COM+ (Enterprise Services in .NET)
for component services. .NET offers several exciting new application
frameworks such as Web Services, ASP.NET, WinForms, WebForms, and
ADO.NET. However, adopting a radically new technology such as .NET is
not going to be an easy endeavor for companies and developers. Most
companies have considerable investments in existing code base and
development skills, and unless they have a compelling reason to move to
.NET or a reasonable migration path, companies will avoid .NET."
Lowy explains that COM+ can offer such a migration path for companies
and developers. "Companies can start (or continue) their projects in
COM, using COM+ as a supporting platform for component services, and
then when the time comes to move to .NET, they can use the same
infrastructure to plug their .NET components into, in a very seamless
manner, reusing and interacting with their existing COM components."
COM and .NET Component Services is the first book to teach the use of
COM+ services for both .NET and COM component-based applications. It
provides practical information on using COM+ component services in
applications, focusing on how to apply the technology, how to avoid
specific pitfalls, and offering design guidelines. Both traditional COM
programmers and the new .NET component developers will find the
information they need to begin developing COM+ applications that take
full advantage of the COM+ services.
"COM+ is not going away," says Lowy. "It's here to stay as long as there
are enterprise applications. On the horizon we'll see even more
component services, and I believe that its role will be more crucial
than ever before as .NET and the need for high throughput, scalable
distributed applications become more pervasive."
COM and .NET
Component Services
By Juval Lowy
October, 2001
ISBN 0-596-00103-7, 362 pages, $39.95 (US)
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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