If you were hoping the recent announcements about the Microsoft .NET Framework would prevent you from having to learn the COM+ programming development model, you will be disappointed.

COM+ has gone through many evolutions since the introduction of OLE technology in the early releases of Microsoft Windows. The alphabet soup of OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, COM, and COM+ has even inspired highly sought-after T-Shirts at most Microsoft-focused technical conferences. But underlying all of this change in marketing message is a core component development technology that every serious Windows developer should be intimately familiar with.

This book will help lay the foundation for a serious understanding of the programming model underlying the .NET Framework recently introduced by Microsoft. COM+ programming techniques will be essential for solutions built today as well as for architectural solutions of the future.

Microsoft has stated that it will continue to enhance COM+ with future versions of its operating systems. It has already announced the inclusion of Application Partitioning, Application Pooling and Recycling, Last Resource Manager for two phase commits, COM+ applications that can execute as Services, and Configurable Transaction Isolation Level for complex transacted environments in Windows .NET (code-named Whistler). Microsoft has also stated that few features of the .NET Framework behave differently from existing COM components. Two examples include the .NET Framework's automatic memory management vs. COM's reference counting and the .NET Framework's XCOPY deployment vs. COM's registration. Taking full advantage of some of these features will require modifying existing COM components, but core concepts embodied by these technologies will not be new to COM+ developers.

COM+ understanding is essential if you want to create XML-enabled applications as well as leverage the SOAP protocols to develop a new generation of Web Services. With .NET, Microsoft is making COM+ much easier and more productive, as well as enabling the kind of software that will be as revolutionary to software development as the introduction of the graphical user interface.