Chapter 38: Enterprise Services

Highlights

Enterprise Services is the name of the Microsoft application server technology that offers services for distributed solutions. Enterprise Services is based on the COM+ technology that has already been in use for many years. However, instead of wrapping .NET objects as COM objects to use these services, .NET offers extensions for .NET components to take direct advantage of these services. With .NET you get easy access to COM+ services for .NET components.

Enterprise Services also has a great integration story with WCF. You can use a tool to automatically create a WCF service front end to a serviced component, and you can invoke a WCF service from a COM+ client.

• This chapter covers the following topics:

• When to use Enterprise Services

• What services you get with this technology

• How to create a serviced component to use Enterprise Services

• How to deploy COM+ applications

• How to use transactions with Enterprise Services

• How to create a WCF front-end to Enterprise Services

• How to use Enterprise Services from a WCF Client

Tip 

The WCF part of this chapter requires that you have .NET Framework 3.0 installed and the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0.

This chapter is using the sample database Northwind, which you can download from the Microsoft downloads page: www.microsoft.com/downloads.