COM, COM+, DCOM, where to start?

Question

I am curious about COM+, DCOM. I know that MSFT does not encourage you to use this tools natively (meaning with C/C++, in fact there is not a lot of documentation available)

Answer 1

COM is still useful if you want to work with, or extend, various Windows APIs, such as shell extensions, scripting host, and so on.

Essential COM (Box) and ATL Internals (Rector and Sells) are excellent sources. Effective COM (Box, et al) is also ok.

If you really want the full picture on COM, try and get a copy of the immense Inside OLE (Brockschmidt).

Distributed COM (Eddon, Eddon) is decent on DCOM, as is Inside COM+ Base Services (Eddon, Eddon) on COM+.

even some supposedly "pure" C++ books have bits on COM in them. Matthew Wilson's Imperfet C++ has some useful parts for seeing how it works on the inside, and his Extended STL book has a couple of chapters on how to adapt COM to STL collections.

If you want to know more about how to write COM servers, you'll probably need to bone up on ATL. The aforementioned ATL Internals is a must. Despite its humble sounding title, Beginning ATL COM has some useful stuff in it too.

Also helpful in the learning process might be to contrast COM with .NET. The .NET and COM Interoperability Handbook is a big swallow, but has some useful stuff in it. Also, I would check out Shared Source CLI Essentials, just to help contrast the two technoloqies.

HTH