COM & .NET Component Services

.NET as a Component Technology

To simplify component development, one of the goals set for the .NET framework was to improve COM deficiencies. Some of these deficiencies, such as awkward concurrency management via apartments, were inherited with COM itself. Other deficiencies occur as a result of error-prone development and deployment phases.

Examples include memory and resource leaks resulting from reference count defects, fragile registration, the need for developer-provided proxy stubs pairs, and having interface and type definition in IDL files separate from the code. Frameworks such as ATL do provide automation of some of the required implementation plumbing, such as class factories and registration, but they introduce their own complexity.

.NET is designed to not only improve these deficiencies, but also maintain the core COM concepts that have proven themselves as core principles of component-oriented development.

.NET provides you fundamental component-oriented development principles, such as binary compatibility between client and component, separation of interface from implementation, object location transparency, concurrency management, security, and language independence. A comprehensive discussion of .NET as a component technology merits a book in its own right and is beyond the scope of this appendix. However, the following sections describe the main characteristics of .NET as a component technology.

Simplified Component Development

Compared to COM, .NET might seem ...