COM+ Programming with Visual Basic

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to create COM+ applications using both COM+ Services and COM+ Administration Components. COM+ applications are packages that hold configuration settings for a group of components. These settings are known as services; a component that lives in a COM+ application is called a configured component. The goal of configured components is to provide functionality to your application without your having to add code. The dream is that you will be able to turn functionality on and off by simply changing a few settings in the COM+ Component Services Explorer. This may be true at some level, but the reality of the environment is that, to take advantage of some of the services, you have to code your components in certain ways. In fact, in the next chapter, you will learn how to interact with the environment. The bottom line is that for this code to work, your components expect to be running in the COM+ environment.

COM+ applications fall into two main categories: server applications and library applications. Server applications run out-of-process to the client. Library applications run in the same address space as the client. You use library applications when you want to share a component among two or more applications and you want the components to run in-process to the applications.

This chapter also focused on deploying the application for both server and client use. One of the main points in this chapter is that, in addition to your components, you ...