Professional NT Services

Author: Kevin Miller List Price: $49.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price Publisher: Wrox (15 January, 2002) Edition: Digital Sales Rank: 5,923 Average Customer Rating: 4.78 out of 5

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Instead:

I would give each LogEvent() method in that class an explicit name, because it makes it more clear which method will be invoked. In my particular case, I sort of assumed his class was good until I noticed that a bunch of my custom messages weren't printing to the event log. Because it was 2:00 AM when I found this, it took me a long time to figure out the problem.

Anyway, the rest of the book is pretty great, a must-have if you're going to be writing a service.

From the beginning the author has the attitude that NT services are easy to understand and his "prophecy" becomes self-fulfilling throughout the book. The book is well organized and it pays special attention to service design and usage patterns.

Also notice that the book does not cover hardware drivers. By the way, do read the previous review titled "One of a kind" as it gives very useful tips on installing ATL services (using "myservice.exe -Service") and housing COM objects in a service; I have not found that information in the book.

Professional NT Services describes the issues involved in writing services, such as security and threading, and provides sample code every step of the way. The book also details how to build a service with ATL and even tells you how to improve ATL's implementation. It even talks a bit about Microsoft Transaction Server (now part of COM+).

Here are three bits of information that I discovered elsewhere that I wish were more evident in the book -

1. If you create an ATL service, the default registation code registers the EXE as a COM server instead of a service -- run "myservice.exe -Service" to register the service.

2. The easiest way for multiple clients to be able to use a single COM instance that's housed in the service is to implement the COM class using DECLARE_CLASSFACTORY_SINGLETON. This is your typical "server" pattern.

3. Clients that want to connect to COM objects housed in the ervice should use CLSCTX_SERVER in CoCreateInstance

Perhaps this information is buried in the book somewhere, but I didn't find it. At any rate, without this book, I wouldn't have known where to start.

Finally, for all its great qualities, the book needs to be revised for Windows 2000. It mentions some new features of "NT5" but I wonder how accurate this information really is.

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