Description
COM has traditionally been considered as something that VB programmers don't need to think about too much: VB is supposed to look after all the nitty-gritty of COM, leaving the VB programmer to rapidly develop working business solutions. However, with Microsoft pushing hard on its multi-tiered technologies, more and more people are becoming aware that COM is something important. For any moderately advanced VB programming at all, COM is present - often under the guise of ActiveX. COM underlies most of what is going on in VB. COM is components and objects: and there are hundreds of objects and components even in the basic VB environment. So what's going on? What is COM? Why is it important? What can VB programmers do with COM? For newcomers to COM, this is all a bit mysterious. For competent but relatively non-technical VB professional programmers, the full story of COM is still somewhat disjointed. Meanwhile, a new type of programming consultant is coming into existence: COM design experts. Why? Because as soon as start writing professional VB applications, you are making COM decisions (or VB is making them for you), whether it be with ActiveX, MTS, DCOM... and some of these decisions have real implications for the success of your software design and performance.
