Office and COM Interop

No matter how revolutionary a new runtime and framework may be, there’s always the “old stuff” to interoperate with. One such artifact from the old pre-CLR days is the Component Object Model (COM). At the point of its introduction in the early 1990s, the core goals of COM included the capability to deal with objects across different languages. For example, it enabled C or C++ developers to create COM components that could be used from Visual Basic and other such languages.

COM originated out of a whole set of technologies that were introduced to deal with cross-process integration scenarios, going all the way back to Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). Out of this grew object linking and embedding (OLE), which lies at the heart ...

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