A Programmer's Introduction to Visual Basic® .NET

Using COM Components from .NET

Perhaps the most common use of interoperability will be the calling of COM components within a .NET application. This makes sense because many companies have invested a significant amount of time and money getting their business logic coded into reusable COM components.

COM components did offer a few of the same benefits seen by the .NET Framework. Specifically, COM looked the same at the binary level, so a client written in VB or an ASP client using VBScript could call a COM component written in C++. COM components written in VB could be called by C++ applications. In fact, non-Microsoft products, such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, could create and consume COM components with ease.

COM looked the same at the binary ...