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In the late ’90s I thought COM (Microsoft’s Component Object Model) was the way of the future. The whole architecture starting with the IUnknown interface was very elegant. And to hear Don Box explain it, COM was almost inevitable.... And yet programming COM was painful. I wondered at the time why something so elegant in theory was so difficult in practice. COM had some good ideas, and some of these ideas have been reborn in WinRT.
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I don't want to turn this into an anti-VB rant, but VB was to blame for a lot of COM problems and a fair bit of the bad rep that COM got. One of the key tenets of COM development was that you never broke the interface - if you wanted to add new features or drop a parameter in a COM method, you defined a new interface and worked with that. Unfortunately, legacy VB borked this completely up as the designers decided they knew better what people wanted out of COM. This was an endless source of frustration for me, that I'd be having to code against an ever shifting target from my nice ATL project because someone forgot to set something in a project dialog that meant a new GUID was generated on every build.
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