Basics

Since COM is such a huge beast, it tremendously helps to start with a few basic and easy to understand concepts. In this chapter, I'll try to approach COM from a "user-friendly" point of view and I hope that this would make much more sense to beginners and even managers (as opposed to purchasing a $50 book on COM and after reading it, you absolutely have no clue what it says!).

COM has a lot of aspects:

Friendship Building Aspect

COM enables an application to be nice and friendly with other applications. It provides an elegant mechanism for applications to talk to each other. It even enables long-distance friendships so that applications from all over the world can chit-chat.

Flexibility & Growth Aspect

COM facilitates growth and evolution of applications. It does this in such a way that friendships never break. COM wants friendships to grow and evolve over time so that applications are always happy.

Interoperability Aspect

COM enables applications to talk to each other regardless of race, creed, or gender. As far as COM is concerned, applications talk to each other using one "language" and this one language is very precise and consistent that there is no possibility of miscommunication.

Coolness Aspect

Aside from the first 3 aspects, COM also provides a lot of other facilities that are pretty "cool" when it comes to developing the real, big, kick-ass applications. These other aspects can sometimes be intimidating, and we'll talk more about them in other chapters.