Effective COM

These guidelines appear under six major headings: the transition from
C++ to COM; interfaces, the fundamental element of COM
development; implementation issues; the unique concept of apartments;
security; and transactions. Throughout this book, the issues unique to
the MTS programming model are addressed in detail. Developers will
benefit from such insight and wisdom as:

• Define your interfaces before you define your classes (and do it in IDL)
  
• Design with distribution in mind
  
• Dual interfaces are a hack. Don't require people to implement them
  
• Don't access raw interface pointers across partment boundaries
  
• Avoid creating threads from an in-process server
  
• Smart Interface Pointers add at least as much complexity as they remove
  
• CoInitializeSecurity is your friend. Learn it, love it, call it
  
• Use fine-grained authentication
  
• Beware exposing object references from the middle of a transaction hierarchy
  
• Don't rely on JIT activation for scalability

For each guideline, the authors present a succinct summary of the challenge at hand, extensive discussion of their rationale for the advice, and many compilable code examples. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of COM concepts, capabilities, and drawbacks, and the know-how to employ COM effectively for high quality distributed application development. A supporting Web site, including source code, can be found at http://www.develop.com/effectivecom.