A Brief Overview of COM
If you've built many Windows applications, you probably have at least a passing familiarity with OLE and ActiveX. OLE originally stood for Object Linking and Embedding and represented the first generation of cross-application object access and manipulation in Windows. The idea was to have a document-centric view of the world where an object from one application could happily reside in and interact with another. OLE 1.0 used DDE (dynamic data exchange) to facilitate communication between objects. DDE is a message-based interprocess communication mechanism that's based on the Windows messaging architecture. DDE has a number of shortcomings (it's slow, inflexible, difficult to program, and so on), so the second version of ...
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