12. COM Interop/PInvoke
The .NET Framework has a remarkable collection of several thousand classes, designed to handle almost every conceivable programming need. Yet there are times when the developer needs a little extra flexibility or performance and turns to legacy applications or low-level system calls. In fact, until all programs are rewritten to .NET standards, you’ll probably have a continuing need to interoperate with the COM world and unmanaged code.
Although you pay a performance penalty whenever you interoperate (data marshaling and additional instructions being the culprits), you sometimes either have no choice because the required functionality doesn’t yet exist in a .NET application, or you simply prefer the legacy applications ...
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