Amazon.co.uk Review
This book provides a worthwhile tour of Microsoft technologies based on DCOM and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) with plenty of advice for today's enterprise developer.
The book begins with Microsoft's Distributed Internet Architecture (DNA) and DNA's notion of a three-tier model for separating business objects for better scalability. Of course, COM is an important part of DNA, and the author's introduction to COM is as good as any. Coverage of database acronyms such as ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) and OLE-DB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) round out the basics. Then the author proceeds to explain the capabilities of MTS, from using it as an object request broker (ORB) for locating remote services, to the fundamentals of transaction processing.
At this point, theory becomes practice, and the author walks the reader through a complete sample MTS-based application, an automated accounting package for the "Classifieds" section of a small newspaper. The author shows how to use Microsoft Visual Database Tools and provides a taste of Microsoft's software methodology called Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF). After you learn how to model objects for the database and business object layers, the book helps you build them using Visual Basic and Visual C++. Finally, you learn the presentation layer, which is built using Active Server Pages (ASPs) for running inside a browser.
Final chapters offer material on additional Microsoft tools, such as the COM-to-mainframe tool (called COMTI) and Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ). There's also a preview of COM+--still under construction and due out with Windows 2000. In all, Designing Component-Based Applications successfully covers the state-of-the-art in component development for the enterprise using the complete range of available Microsoft tools and technologies. --Richard Dragan
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