I’m using ServicedComponent from EnterpriseServices AKA Com+ for
- Distributed transactions
- Simple transaction programming by using attributes
- Object pooling
Things that I find lacking in com+
- The lack of dll versioning
- Pain of having to gac & reg every time I change a component
- Having to attach debugger
I’m aware that WCF solves some of the same problems as COM+. But does it solve all of them? Could somebody point me in the right direction?
Thanks
I’m not very familiar with the ins and outs of COM+, but WCF was built to replace it and Enterprise Services in the .NET platform. All of the use cases you mention here are baked into the framework (pooling, transactions, versioning), and are pretty much trivial to code against, so long as you put in the time to learn how it wants to do things. When you get things configured correctly, there’s pretty much no limit to what you can do with it.
WCF also underpins a lot of what Microsoft is working on for the immediate and longer term future (Azure Services). I’d consider this a worthwhile investment of your learning time, especially considering your COM+ background.
I would strongly recommend Juval Lowy’s book as a good starting point. He is probably about as authoritative a voice as you will find on this subject.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596521301/?CMP=AFC-ak_book&ATT=Programming+WCF+Services%2c+Second+Edition%2c
I would also recommend you check out his company IDesign’s website. Not only do they offer excellent training, but they have a very useful library of WCF extensions called ServiceModelEx that provides a number of utility extensions/helper classes that make your WCF life a lot easier.
http://www.idesign.net/idesign/DesktopDefault.aspx
If you’re looking for a more tutorial style book, Michele Leroux Bustamante’s book is also quite good.