Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

Before COM

There was a time not so long ago in software development when it was quite normal to distribute full source code and/or header files with third-party libraries. In order to make use of these libraries, people simply compiled them (or included their header files) into applications. The end result was a single executable that might contain code from many different vendors. Since it was common for many developers to use the same third-party library, a version of the library might exist in the executables deployed with numerous products. Executables tended to be relatively large and there was little or no code sharing between them. Updating one of these third-party libraries required recompilation and/or relinking since the library was ...