I would like to drive your attention to that the COM+ 1.5 has the enhanced generation of Explorer user interface. As you recall, under COM+ 1.0, the only technique to tell the activation type of a COM+ application was to bring up its Activation tab and examine it. The COM+ 1.5 Explorer allocates different icons to different application types. This will give us the chance to figure out the type of the application, server, library, proxy, or service, just by viewing icons from Explorer’s window. You can find Running Processes folder, which contains all the currently executing applications, providing easy runtime administration under My Computer. This folder is very important to watch applications if any runtime problem occurs.
Figure 1 Legacy Component Properties Page
As you may recall the COM+ 1.0 Explorer only gives you the ability to handle
and administrate configured components. If your software is built entirely on
configured components, then that may not be a problem for you. Unfortunately,
often enterprise class software needs legacy and some other types of components.
Developers use other tools in addition to the COM+ Explorer to manage legacy
components in a diverse environment. The best examples to these tools are OLEView,
Visual Studio, or custom tools. Programmers need to handle two types of deployment
approaches. First of them uses exported COM+ applications (MSI files) and the
second may include anything that they need to do to install their specific legacy
components. Fortunately, COM+ 1.5 supports all those for legacy applications
and components. This allows you to deal with every characteristic of your legacy
applications and components.
You will find a new folder called DCOM Config under My Computer in the COM+
1.5 Explorer. This important folder is closely related to the COM+ Applications
folder also includes all the registered COM local servers on your Computer.
All of the local servers are called a legacy application and you cannot expand
a legacy application down to the component, interface, or method level as you
do in COM+ application, when we focus on COM+ 1.5 we see that a legacy application
is concrete. As a result, this folder gives you the ability to handle and administrate
both your COM+ applications and your legacy local servers. In addition, at this
point you will not need the utilities, which you used in previous version of
COM+.
If you select properties from legacy application’s popup context menu,
you can handle and administrate all the characteristic specifications. Another
important issue for a developer is security. For a developer the other Tabs
are not very important. On the other hand, Security tab allows you to configure
access, launch, and change permissions for each user. When you need your COM+
application to use a legacy component, you can use COM+ 1.5 Explorer and it
will allow you to handle and administrate those. When you develop a COM+ 1.5
application that has legacy components than it will have a folder named Legacy
Components. If you like to add a legacy component into this folder just select
New from the context menu. One of the most important advantages of COM+ 1.5
Explorer is the Import Wizard, which allows you to select legacy components
and add them to your COM+1.5 applications. I would like to remind you that legacy
components can be added only in the same application.
If you need to see registry entry or a legacy component, you can use properties
page. However, I need to bring your attention to registry entries because you
can only change the values of settings, which do not conflict with registry
settings in the component itself. All those save the developer’s time
and make the application effective and bug-free. If you are a developer that
uses Windows XP than you will have all this functionality of new COM+ 1.5 Explorer
and Legacy Components.
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