Chapter 4. Working with .NET Components

Having seen the language-integration examples in the previous chapter, you now know that all .NET assemblies are essentially binary components.^[1] You can treat each .NET assembly as a component that you can plug into another component or application, without the need for source code, since all the metadata for the component is stored inside the .NET assembly. While you have to write a ton of plumbing code to build a component in COM, creating a component in .NET involves no extra work, as all .NET assemblies are components by nature.

^[1] Remember, as we explained in Chapter 1, we're using the term "component" as a binary, deployable unit, not as a COM class.

In this chapter, we examine the more advanced topics, including component deployment, distributed components, and enterprise services, such as transaction management, object pooling, role-based security, and message queuing.