Aimed at more experienced VB or C++ developers, Developing ASP Components, 2nd edition, gives plenty of advanced advice for creating and using COM-based components, which are a must for serious scalability and performance on the Microsoft Web platform.

This book excels at showing the inner workings and issues in designing custom COM-based components in VB, ATL, and/or MFC, as well as tapping the built-in components that come standard with COM, including transactions, mail objects (with CDO), and database programming (with ADO). In particular, for the C++/ATL/MFC developer, practical sources of information (and sample code) are in short supply, and for this readership, the book fills a particularly worthwhile niche. Much of it uses VB in examples for designing effective, high-performance components.

Several early sections look at the details of COM-based components (including the notoriously difficult threading models, along with similar details). The author does a good job of explaining this challenging topic. The practical examples of using built-in COM objects and services on the Windows platform really make this book a winner. The sample code and hints for tapping such COM-based standards as transactions, Active Directory, message queuing, CDO, and ADO are very helpful. Better yet, the book covers the same ground for C++ programmers using ATL (and MFC) to create the most lightweight (and potentially the fastest) Web components available today.

Until the new .NET Framework arrives later in 2001, COM (and COM+) is still the best way to build and share components for use with ASP in Windows. Developing ASP Components shows you how to build components that are fully integrated into the Microsoft Web platform. Whether you build custom components or just want to use services in VB/C++ code that are available to your Web applications, this title will clue you into getting the most out of your components. It's a source of expert information that you won't likely find anywhere else.