ACM
San Francisco Bay Area Chapter
The First Society In Computing

Memorandum

Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 11:35:37 -0800

From:	Vince Lauricella
	email: optima@acm.org

To:	SANFRAN@ACM.ORG

Subject:

ACM PDS 4/15: COM+, An Overview

The local chapter of the ACM will hold a...

OVERVIEW

Developing distributed enterprise systems poses problems that developing single-desktop systems does not, such as security, data integrity, synchronization, scalability, and overlapping client-server lifetime. Writing our own software to solve these problems takes far too long, costs far too much, and we often can't acquire the skill set to do them adequately. Fortunately, COM+ in Windows 2000 provides prefabricated solutions to these and other problems of enterprise software development.

This class will examine the COM+ runtime environment and the services provided by it, many of which are accessed by administrative settings instead of writing code. We will examine the concept of a COM+ component, and the mechanisms used for activating them. We will look at the COM+ catalog, the system database in which the administrative settings are kept. We will discuss the concept of an object's context, the environment that it requires to run. We will see, with software demonstrations how to take advantage of COM+ security, synchronization, transaction, asynchronous communication, and publish-and-subscribe event services.

The basic idea is to expose students in a single day to as many of the different capabilities of COM+ as possible. At the end of the day, we want them to know the answer to the question, "What prefabricated technologies does COM+ provide for my use, and what problems do they solve?"

Prerequisites:

Familiarity with the concepts of component software and COM is helpful but not required. Code examples for this seminar are extremely simple and will be shown in Visual Basic. The material will be presented using easily understood language.

SPEAKER

David S. Platt is the President of Rolling Thunder Computing and an instructor in Computer Science at Harvard University. He teaches COM and COM+ at public seminars and in-house at companies all over the world. His class on COM+ in the spring of 1999 was the first university-level for-credit class on this topic in the known universe. His latest book, "Understanding COM+" from Microsoft Press, is Microsoft's lead book on its latest enhancements to COM. It is currently outselling Tom Clancy's "Every Man a Tiger" on amazon.com. He publishes "ThunderClap", a quarterly newsletter on COM+ development, available free from his Web site, www.rollthunder.com. His column "ActiveXplained" appears bi-monthly on Byte.Com He is also the author of "The Essence of COM with ActiveX" from Prentice-Hall, a top-notch book on COM for beginning programmers, and many articles on COM in Microsoft Systems Journal. "He's the only guy I've ever known that can actually make an article on COM's apartment threading model funny," said one student. He did his undergraduate work at Colgate University, and earned a Master of Engineering degree from Dartmouth College.

What Will Be Covered and What You Will Learn

Session I - Introduction and Basic Architecture of COM+ :

Schedule

    8:00 - 8:30             Registration
    8:30 - 8:45             Welcome
    8:45 - 10:15            Session I
    10:15 - 10:30           Break
    10:30 - 12:00           Session II
    12:00 - 1:00            Lunch
    1:00 - 2:30             Session III
    2:30 - 2:45             Break
    2:45 - 4:15             Session IV
    4:15 - 4:30             Summary

REGISTRATION FORM

Register early! Capacity limited to 200

Mail in Registration for ACM Professional Development Seminar Saturday, April 15, 2000

PLEASE PRINT

   Member: National & Local ACM    $80    ACM Membership No.
   Member: Local ACM Only          $85
   Member: National ACM Only       $85*
   Non- Member                     $95*
   Students - Full time            $50

DIRECTIONS

From 280