I don't NEED to use COM+, it would just make things a heck of a lot easier if it worked a bit nicer with .NET, instead of enforcing all the same priciples it does with a vanilla C++ or VB app. In fact, no one really needs to use COM+. The whole point of COM+ is to provide a set of declarative services that your code can plug into, so that you don't have to worry about the details. Many of these services (like JIT activation, object pooling, etc.) probably aren't going to be needed unless you are building a very large app that has to handle a ton of requests. However, some of the features (such as role based security, automatic transaction completion, and integration with the DTC) are things that plenty of "non-enterprise level" apps need (though I would argue that "enterprise level" apps are no longer always those big, monolithic systems they once were, due to things like COM+ which have allowed more and more developers to build scalable systems w/o a lot of the extra coding burden...the whole "enterprise application" definition is a cloudy one). Why should developers outside of the enterprise space not be allowed to take advantage of this already tried, tested, and proven functionality?

Before anyone flames me for saying "no one really needs COM+", I am just pointing out that you could do all the work yourself if you wanted, but it would take a heck of a lot of code, and that is the problem COM+ addresses.