.NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide

Foreword

Working on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for the past three-and-a-half years has been a fantastic opportunity. It’s not often that you get the chance to work on a project where you can forget about the past and design an exciting new set of technologies from the ground up, uninhibited by the constraints of maintaining backward compatibility.

The CLR offers a fresh solution to the problems developers face in building and using reusable components and deployable applications. It’s an entirely new architecture aimed squarely at simplifying the development and deployment process. In designing the CLR we took the opportunity to step back and look at the process of writing reusable components using COM today. We examined the problems ...