| DCOM Explained by Rosemary Rock-Evans Digital Press ISBN: 1555582168 Pub Date: 09/01/98

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## Chapter 1
Introduction to This Book

### What Is This Book About?

This book describes the functions of DCOM—Microsoft’s Distributed Component Object Model—and the services based on DCOM, which can be used to build distributed applications.

The aim of this book is not to teach you how to develop distributed applications using DCOM, but to explain what functions DCOM provides so that you are able to use DCOM more effectively, understand the options open to you when using DCOM, and understand something of the types of application that can be built using DCOM.

We have concentrated also on explaining on which platforms besides Windows NT the services are found so that you know more about the limitations and possibilities of developing with DCOM.

### Who Is It For?

Technical designers will find this book useful, as will systems analysts, systems designers, programmers with an interest in design, technical architects, and possibly technical managers and project leaders. If you really have little idea what DCOM is or does and want a simple-to-read overview of what you can do with it—this book is for you!

### Any Bias?

Many books on the market about COM, Microsoft technologies, CORBA (the OMG’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture), objects, and so on are written by the vendors’ employees. On the one hand, this has the advantage that the information in them is “from the horse’s mouth.” On the other hand, the information you get may be biased toward the products they are describing—perhaps a glowing picture is painted of the merits without much attention being paid to the problems. It has been particularly noticeable that books about CORBA have often included some quite savage criticisms of DCOM.

This book contains no such bias. First, I haven’t worked for the vendors of either DCOM (that is, Microsoft!) or the vendors of CORBA products. Perhaps of more importance, however, is that my job involves intensive examination of these products for evaluation purposes. Thus, on the one hand, I have access to the technical details of the products, but on the other hand, I am in the happy position of being able to give you a balanced picture of the advantages and disadvantages of DCOM and how it compares with CORBA.

Not only will you be getting a description of DCOM from this book, but it will be a balanced, independent one.

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