Just got back from tonight's Israel web developers group meeting. The lecture was made by Yosi Taguri & Lior Rozner and was about the basics of COM+.
Now, I never got the chance to work on an application that used COM+(I'm sorry to say), but I've always wanted to learn this subject. Today's lecture was one of the best intros into this subject that I've seen anywhere.
These two guys went up on stage(or rather, down - the stage was not elevated,it was sunken) and started out with very common, very simple applications - ones that we've all done before. "Take two tables, bind them to a data grid, do two changes on the Dataset, and submit". From that - they developed the same application only using transactions, then proceeded to do the same application with COM+ transactions, and then explained about the beauty of distributed transactions.
Of course, transactions are not everything, but they were the best "business case" to show to a crowd of developers. They showd real problems, and real solutions. They also recommended this book: Transactional COM+: Building Scalable Applications
The lecture was great. Hey, Its the first time I've seen anyone pull out a Matrix(the first) DVD and play a scene just to start the discussion about the Context in COM+. They showd the scene in which mopheus explains to new what is the matrix, right at the start of the movie, and we were all told - "Whenever you hear the word 'Matrix' - substitute it with the word 'Context'".
What you get is morpheus saying something like this:
"The context is all around you. It is the air that you breath. Is goes with you to church, to work, it is the world that had been pulled over your eyes to cover you from the truth"
Very cool.
Then they pulled out the X-Box and we all played Halo. How's that for a finish?
Somehow - this had something to do with the lecture(I swear I heard them mumbling something about context and transactions, but they were too busy messing around with the joysticks:)
The lecture was done by them both, and to be fair I have to say the the first part - in which the architecute of a simple 3-tier application was explained - was a bit slow. It all turned around, though, when the second part came up. Boy, when people talk about stuff they love - their faces just shine. Great job guys!