Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

Preface

I’ve been fortunate in my career to have lived through most generations of Microsoft component technologies. In the mid-1990s, I developed dynamic link libraries and exported their functions, and I used Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) extension DLLs to expose classes. I experienced firsthand the enormous complexity involved in managing a set of interacting applications comprised of 156 DLLs and deployed as a single unit, as well as the maintenance and versioning issues raised by their use of ordinal numbers. I helped design COM-like solutions to those problems, and I remember when I first heard about COM and when I generated my first GUID using a command-line utility.

I learned how to write class factories and IDL interfaces long before the release of ATL, and I tried to use RPC before DCOM abstracted it away. I designed component-based applications using COM and experienced what it takes to share design ideas with other developers who aren’t familiar with its requirements. I programmed with MTS and learned the workarounds involved in its use, and I marveled at the elegance and usefulness of COM+ when it came to architecting large-scale enterprise frameworks.

My understanding of component-oriented programming has evolved and grown over that time, just as the component-based technologies themselves have done. I have often asked myself what the fundamental principles of using components are, and in what ways they differ from traditional object-oriented programming. I have tried ...