I was working on integrating a COM+ application (service) into my .NET application. The goal was to have this service layer on a different machine and the calling application would use the service over DCOM.

This seemed to be pretty straightforward, but I kept coming up against this very strange error that said, “The component or application containing the component has been disabled”.

I scoured the Windows 2003 Component Services Explorer looking for a way to enable my application and/or component, however there was no luck. Finally, I stumbled across the answer which is that the server had been misconfigured.

With Windows 2003, you have to manually enable Network COM+ Access. You can do this with Add/Remove Programs

Add/Remove Windows Components

Application Server

Details

Enable Network COM+ Access.

This was a pretty maddening error to get past and hopefully this helps someone else out.

On another note, I did recently pick up Christian Nagel’s book entitled Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework. What I’ve read so far is very educational, and this books seems to be a real winner. Great work, Christian.