>I'm hoping someone can clear up a few things about COM servers for me. Specifically, I'm ready to deploy my servers on a dedicated muscle machine, but want to make sure of a few things first.
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>During my learning how stage, I've been running the COM servers on my own machine, for easier debugging, seeing what's going on, etc.
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>In this stage, I have settled on using Out-of-Process servers (EXE's), since they can be asynchronous. IOW, using my own version of the Form+Timer example that ships with fox, I've got some servers built that return control to the user after the crunching routine is started, notify the user periodically that they are alive and processing, and notify the user when they are done.
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>So here's the question. It seems that MTS has so many nifty features that I would want to use it on the dedicated COM server machine (having seen Gary Dewitt's excellent presentation at Devcon). Except that it only handles DLL's, and I know that running the Form+Timer trick did not work when running a DLL on my own machine. Is there a way to use the Form+Timer trick in a DLL running on another machine? Did I miss something when doing it on my own machine? Basically I want to deploy these servers on a dedicated machine, but still keep the "asynchronous" behavior: Having control return to the client, and having the server send periodic (I know, not too often cuz of overhead) messages to the user.
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>As always, TIA...

You are correct that the form can't be displayed from a VFP COM DLL. This doesn't mean you can't use one...just don't make it visible. Now, having said that, you really don't want to have an asynchronous connection to MTS. There is some excellent material on MTS at msdn.microsoft.com/mastering and www.microsoft.com/seminar. You should also carefully read (and reread) the SP3 help file that gets installed in your VFP directory when you apply Visual Studio Service Pack 3. It discusses several things you will need to be aware of when running your COM object under MTS...particuarly multi-threaded DLLs.