Platform SDK: Transaction Server

Building an MTS Package for Export

[This product will work only on Windows NT 4.0 versions and earlier. For Windows 2000 and later, see COM+ (Component Services).]

To export packages, your components must be properly configured so that MTS can automate package registration on a server or client computer. When building a package, therefore, you should consider how the package might be distributed.

You can use the package export option in the Microsoft Transaction Server Explorer to export your package to another server computer running MTS. You can also generate application executables for remote client computers running Windows NT or Windows 98 to access your server application. Consider the requirements for package export while you are creating and configuring packages.

By default, application executables configure client machines to access the remote MTS server on which the executable was generated. You can modify the location of the server application by configuring the Option tab of the Computer property sheets. Before you generate the executable, select My Computer in the MTS Explorer, right-click, and choose Properties from the right-click menu. Click the Options tab and enter the machine name of the server that you want the client computer to access in the Remote server name box. Note that the computer name that you enter must be the MTS server running the package. Then click OK. When you generate the client executable, the executable will configure that client to access the server that you specified in the Remote server name box. This allows you to balance the load of your application statically by having multiple clients point to more than one machine running the same package.

Requirements for Package Export

Package developers, or advanced system or Web administrators who deploy packages must observe the following requirements while building and deploying MTS packages:

The client install utility uses the language-independent resource to determine the version number of the component. For Visual C++ components, you must change the application version number in the language-independent as well as the language-dependent resource. If you do not change the language-independent resource, the client executable may overwrite a more current version with an outdated version of the component.
Remove the descriptions of standard COM interfaces from the client-only application type libraries. For example, the package developer may have defined an interface such as IObjectSafety in a type library in order to use that interface with Visual Basic. Removing descriptions of the interface before exporting will prevent the interface from being improperly registered and unregistered on client machines. Failure to remove standard COM interface descriptions from the client-only type library could lead to the failure of any other application using those standard interfaces.
If any of the globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) that are in the server package (including class, interface, or type-library identifiers) and are used by clients change, you will need to re-export the package if you want to generate an updated client install executable. Clients of your application will not be able to access the server application until they run the new client install executable. Note that some development tools (such as Microsoft® Visual Basic®) may change these GUIDs without notifying the developer.

For more information about using the MTS Explorer to distribute MTS packages, see the Distributing MTS Packages section.