Professional Visual C++ MTS Programming

Expert COM programmer Richard Grimes shares his knowledge of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and ATL in Professional Visual C++ 6 MTS Programming. Like some of his other titles (ATL COM Programmer's Reference and Beginning ATL 3 COM Programming), this book combines his in-depth knowledge of COM with a programmer's eye for detail in getting the most out of your COM objects. Written for the expert C++ programmer with some previous knowledge of COM and ATL, this book fills a useful niche for letting you create optimized server objects with the best potential for scalability on the Microsoft server platform.

The book jumps right in with a discussion of what happens when you make COM calls with an in-depth discussion of COM interception. The author shows that you can emulate some of the powers of MTS yourself. (Simply put, by managing resources and transactions for you, MTS-enabled COM objects can be more scalable and robust.) Short code excerpts show off programming with COM and MTS together. The author also demonstrates a method to tweak the wizard-generated code in Visual C++, enabling you to write more powerful MTS-aware ATL components.

You can also enable your ATL-based objects to access corporate data with ADO using the introduction provided here. The last section on the new COM+ available in Windows 2000 illuminates the capabilities of MTS that will soon be integrated into the COM+ infrastructure itself. The author provides a detailed tour here of what COM+ means for the future.

In all, Professional Visual C++ 6 MTS Programming is a book for experts who want to see what MTS (and COM+) do under the hood. If you need to squeeze more performance out of your MTS-enabled ATL components, take a look at this technically savvy book. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: COM and MTS, threads and contexts, type libraries and fast format strings, marshaling and interception, MTS feature overview, surrogates, object contexts, transactions, just-in-time (JIT) activation, programming ATL for MTS COM objects, AppWizard support for ATL, OLE DB programming with ATL, MTS packages and deployment, administration modules for MTS 2.0, Distributed Transaction Controller (DTC), COM security and deployment, debugging MTS, using Visual Studio Analyzer, COM+ overview: new features and administration.