Component based development with COM+ and .NET

Marossy Kálmán <coloman@avalon.aut.bme.hu>

BME-AAIT

Charaf Hassan Phd. <hassan@avalon.aut.bme.hu>

BME-AAIT

With the universal growth of the Internet the software developing demands have changed. Lots of special requirements seem to become common, like extremely rapid development, good quality, economy and very good adaptability to new needs, scalability, fitting into human models and the ease of integration with legacy software. These hard requirements can be fulfilled only with a suitable approach, a good software developing aspect called Component Based Development (CBD).

To satisfy these requirements it is essential to have a software infrastructure, which responsibility is to provide services commonly needed. If everybody developed its own solution for the same problem, it would not be a good solution. CBD solves this because the components in the executing environment can access various services in general. The most familiar component systems are COM+, CORBA, EJB and .NET.

COM is the component system of Microsoft, and COM+ is the enhanced version of COM with other important services. Although COM is maybe the most often used component system today, because of some of its limitations and deficiency the .NET component executing environment was introduced.

In .NET we can find a lot of elegant answers to many tiring problems in COM and a lot of enhancements as well. For example, the versioning of components is solved, we can inherit from a component written in different language, the security needed for Internet accessibility is assured, and the automated memory management (garbage collection) is present. It can be said that .NET is an executing environment for the Internet age, which can interoperate seamlessly with COM.

This lecture demonstrates a conception how to build systems with CBD approach – building primarily on COM+ and .NET grounds.