In the late 1990s, Rockford Lhotka wrote about how to create distributed, object-oriented Windows applications using the limited facilities of Visual Basic 6, COM, and DCOM. The introduction of .NET has motivated him to revisit those themes and revise his strategy. In this book, he explains how .NET changes what's possible, and demonstrates what he believes to be the best way to use it.
The book has three parts. In the first, the author analyzes logical and physical application architectures, exploring their effect on scalability, fault tolerance, and performance. In the second, he implements and documents a Visual Basic .NET framework for the creation of distributed, object-oriented applications that employ .NET technologies including remoting, serialization, and auto-deployment. This framework encapsulates functionality such as database access, transaction handling, and location transparency, which are inherited automatically by any applications created from it.
In the last part of the book, the author uses the framework to create a sample application, and demonstrates the ease with which it's possible to write Windows, web, and web services interfaces for the underlying objects.
