At last! A programmer's guide to what goes on in the making of a robust and professional Service. With this book, Kevin teaches the developer how to design, implement and configure good NT services using C++ and COM (using ATL). It also sets a firm grounding for the configuration and security issues needed to develop a system service. By the end it will have presented several real-world, power examples that demonstrate important design principles. The book's development of usage patterns will be invaluable to client-server developers who want to include services as part of a multi-tiered system, for example, with IIS, as a business object broker, or as a backend to lightweight client development using DCOM.