COM & .NET Component Services

Application Partitioning

Application partitioning is an intricate new service aimed to refine and improve management of COM+ applications in a large-scale environment. An in-depth discussion of application partitions is beyond the scope of this appendix and requires an understanding of Active Directory. Instead, this appendix provides a simplified overview of the partition concept.

An application partition is a group of COM+ 1.5 applications. Partitions provide you with an economic way to present each user (be it a logged-on user or a call coming in across the network) with its own set of applications and components. Partitions are usually configured in Active Directory.

Under COM+ 1.0, a component can belong to only one COM+ application on a given machine. If you want to install the same component (same CLSID) in multiple applications, you have to do so on multiple machines. COM+ partitions allow you to install the same component in more than one application, provided the applications belong to different partitions. A given machine can contain multiple partitions, and each partition can have its own set of applications and components. You can assign users to partitions in the Active Directory. COM+ 1.5 also defines a base partition —a partition that all users share. When a user tries to create a component, COM+ first looks in the partition the user is associated with. If that partition has that component, then COM+ creates it. If it does not, COM+ looks in the base partition; ...