Special Edition Using C#

Accessing Existing COM Components from Managed Code

COM is an open standard for developing business components. These business components are deployed in the middle tier of enterprise applications and are reusable. To understand how C# code (or any managed code, for that matter) interacts with COM components, you must first understand the difference between early binding and late binding.

Binding

A client interacts with a component by using the properties and methods of the component. In order to access the properties and methods of a component, the client needs to be bound to the component. The process of associating a client with a component is referred to as binding. There are two types of binding:

• Early binding— Early binding, as the name ...