March 2003
Intermediate to advanced
912 pages
27h 17m
English
Microsoft's component object model COM, dating from 1993, was designed to make it easier for their software developers to create new releases of Windows operating systems that are compatible with previous versions and to encapsulate applications. It was necessary to be able to evolve and reuse existing components. To allow Windows operating systems to function as parts of distributed systems, COM was integrated with OSF's DCE, an RPC protocol, in NT 4.0. Product names such as Active/X, Network-OLE and DCOM were used but the term COM has come to subsume these and imply a distributed component object model.
Unlike other object-oriented middleware COM therefore supports binary encapsulation of server objects and binary compatibility. ...