COM Revisited
Component technologies focus on the contracts between independently developed and deployed programs. The Component Object Model (COM) was Microsoft's first attempt at formalizing these contracts both as a design paradigm and through supporting platform technology. The design paradigm of COM was that component contracts are expressed as type definitions. This was a step forward from the world COM replaced, in which contracts were expressed only as simple functional entry points. In this respect, COM was a major advance because it brought the dynamic loading of code and the type system together in a fairly self-consistent manner.
The COM programming model itself has stood the test of time extremely well. COM combined existing ideas ...
Get Essential .NET, Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
