Many developers encounter COM+ issues that have already been worked through by other developers. This book documents these common COM+ design and implementation issues, gives you proven ways of solving them, and presents practical technical advice and information to help you avoid COM+ pitfalls. It offers a wealth of design patterns, best practices for implementation, explanations of how the latest COM+ services work, plus in-depth analyses of performance trade-offs between competing COM+ solutions—all so that you can profit from the experience of those who have been successful in the COM+ development environment in enterprise projects across various industries. It also gives you extensive code samples in text and on the companion CD-ROM in Microsoft Visual C++ and Visual Basic. Packed with problem-solving insights, this book covers these topics: COM+ fundamentals: Handling errors properly to enhance the maintainability of your software; employing smart pointers to improve robustness; understanding string details in C++ and international development; making the most of COM+ concurrency; learning to create, call, and implement COM+ objects in interoperable development environments. Architectural patterns and solutions: Taking advantage of the Active Template Library (ATL) to achieve reuse through multiple inheritance; building efficient cross-platform data-transformation services; understanding marshal-by-value implementations in C++ and Visual Basic; mastering COM+ reference-cycle management; using generic programming and the Standard Template Library (STL) in the COM+ realm. COM+ in the enterprise: Architecting business systems with a COM+ four-tier business-object application pattern; designing solutions with the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP); building massively scalable systems with Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS); understanding data access in the COM+ age.