Microsoft® Visual J#™ .NET (Core Reference)

Chapter 14. Serviced Components and COM+

COM is a powerful technology. In the old days, to build COM components successfully you had to understand how the "plumbing" worked—you were forced to spend time worrying about building implementations of IUnknown, IDispatch, and other common interfaces before you could even begin to worry about implementing your business logic. Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 changed that to some extent, generating much of the required boilerplate code for you automatically. The Microsoft .NET Framework goes a step further by generating COM callable wrappers (CCWs) for your classes if you want to expose them to COM clients. If you read the previous chapter, this is old news.

COM had its critics—it was difficult to build scalable ...