Summary

In this chapter, you learned about a simple and practical way of building applications that communicate through SSL using DCOM. By building server components that sit on the server with IIS, if you have SSL enabled on IIS, you can pass secure information to and from the client. You learned how easily you can do so by using RDS: when you have the appropriate software installed on the client, you don't have to do any further configuration. You also learned how to configure DCOM to tunnel through HTTP and TCP/IP, without any special programming effort, although this method does involve all the client DCOM configuration effort for every server object that you need to call from the client.

At this point, you should have a relatively good understanding of how you can incorporate encryption with your Visual Basic applications. In the next few chapters, you'll learn how to interact with the security in NT 4 and Windows 2000. You'll learn how to impersonate a user to control access based on the OS-configured security and how to validate a user login against the OS domain. You'll also see how you can interact with the Active Directory Security Interface (ADSI), along with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. Finally, you'll look at the new security model being introduced with COM+ and learn how it is similar and different from the security model used in Microsoft's Transaction Server.