Hi,

I am a newcomer to the world of COM having come from the world of DCE
and DFS and I was hoping that some of you helpful spirits out there
could give me a few hints. Here is my problem. Where I come from, Encina (IBM Websphere), DCE and DFS, it is quite easy to send a request from a client to a specific server, since you have a server/ interface browser, in version 5 this is what is called Universal Binding, contrary to Transparent Binding, where you don't really care what server/database connection you want to run on, scaling is by the way not an issue either. In the application I have to port from DC/DFS/Encina to COM+ it is of paramount importance that a client can pin-point the server it want's to run on and also that the configuration is scalable, i.e. you can easily slap-on an extra server if needed. With my meager knowledge of COM+ it appears that GUIDs are static and is sort of hard-coded in the IDL code at compile time and cannot be assigned at run-time. Am I correct in this assumption? If that is the case it would make it very hard to scale things properly, since you sort of have to compile a new server with a new GUID every time you want to expand. I were thinking of pre-making a bunch of GUIDs in the registry and then assign them as they started up. Is there any "official" way (or hack, I don't care) you could do this?

To make it more clear, when talking about server I really mean a copy of the COM+ executable that services the COM+ client. i.e. I envision having multiple identical copies of the same executable running each servicing a subset of clients and each having one connection to the database.