All this whole recent discussion on Enterprise Services and COM+ has made me think a little bit more on what my own opinions on the whole matter, and I've come to a few conclusions:

My biggest wish for .NET EnterpriseServices is for them to become more transparent. How so? Well, the whole constant COM+ registration/deregistration thingie seriously cramps my development style. I find it very annoying during development, particularly since I've become a unit testing junkie, so usually running the unit tests will mean registering the COM+ applications. Bleagh!.

So yes, I'd love to be able to take advantage of those services without needing to registering in COM+. Now, this might seem farfetched at first, but I think it really isn't: As Clemens said, COM+ server applications offer a controlled environment; well, so does every .NET application, and that's the runtime hosting it. So I think it would be perfectly possible to have the runtime provide many of these services to the application. This is obviously an oversimplification, but I think it would be an interesting idea to explore, at least.

So, in the end, It's not so much that I think EnterpriseServices is unneeded, but rather, I think there could be a better way to do it in .NET. At least I hope...


Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.