Developing .NET Components
A component technology is more than just a set of rules and guidelines for how to build components. A successful component technology must provide a development environment and tools that will allow you to rapidly develop components. .NET offers a superb development environment and semantics that are the product of years of observing the way developers use COM and the hurdles they face. .NET 2.0 also includes innovative solutions to problems faced by developers using previous versions. All .NET programming languages are component-oriented in their very nature, and the primary development environment (Visual Studio 2005) provides views, wizards, and tools that are oriented toward developing components. .NET shields you from the underlying raw operating services and instead provides operating-system-like services (such as filesystem access or threading) in a component-oriented manner. The services are factored into various components in a logical and consistent fashion, resulting in a uniform programming model. You will see numerous examples of these services throughout this book. The following subsections detail key factors that enable .NET to significantly simplify component development.
The .NET Base Classes
When you develop .NET components, there is no need to master a hard-to-learn component development framework such as the Active Template Library (ATL), which was used to develop COM components in C++. .NET takes care of all the underlying plumbing. ...