MTS ( Microsoft Transaction monitor ) is a Transaction Monitor and an Object Request Broker in one box. It comes free with all flavors of NT and may well be in all flavors of Windows in the next year. MTS is needed to have easily distributed applications using COM, without it, DCOM is a continuous headache of juggling code and communications between objects. If distributed COM applications means objects existing anywhere on a network; being used by any other COM program; being called by any other COM task and connecting to data or other resource - then some kind of object traffic cop is needed. That's MTS. The server DOES take charge of transactions, yes, but it is also the way that thousands of COM objects can be used by hundreds of clients virtually simultaneously. No client needs to feel : slow, insecure, disconnected or out-of-date with MTS as the controller. MTS is a brilliant way to manage COM objects, groups of objects, and components the book is a deconstruction of how it achieves this.
Expert COM programmer Richard Grimes shares his knowledge of Microsoft Transactions 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 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 optimised server objects with the best potential for scalability on the Microsoft server platform.
This 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 underneath 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, marshalling 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.
