C# 4.0 Unleashed

Component-Driven Development with COM

Because larger applications were written on the Windows platform, it became apparent that a more structured approach to building software was required. This evolution originated from the world of Office, where users wanted to embed content from different Office files in other containers (for example, to display an Excel chart in a Word document). The technology that enabled this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). No longer could applications be written as silos; different parts had to start working together.

In essence, one can think about software as a Lego kit: Given a number of building blocks, it should be easy to compose bigger constructs using the individual blocks. Such blocks were called ...