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by William Rubin and Marshall Brain

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This is a great introduction to the difficult but important Microsoft standard DCOM. The authors Marshall Brian and William Rubin can show you everything you need to know to use DCOM without a lot of jargon or needless complexity. By just reading the book and following the examples, you could be able to write simple COM applications.

The articles presented here are adapted from the first few chapters in the book. The articles also contain down-loadable source code for easy to understand examples.

[ View the Adobe PDF for this book ]

• [ Download the BeepClient project (9KB) ]
• [ Download the BeepServer project (17KB) ]

Introduction

For many people, learning COM and DCOM is tough. You know that learning COM is the right thing to do - you hear constant hype and you know that many of Microsoft's products and programmer tools are based on COM, so it is obviously something that is important. But you also know that COM is really hard. You may have already tried to learn COM once, or maybe even several times. You may have slid through a couple of books, played with some wizards, etc... But it just doesn't make any sense. Everything seems extremely complicated and much harder than it needs to be. There's also the vocabulary: "marshalling", "apartment threads", "singleton objects" and so on. What is this?

The purpose of this set of tutorials is to help you to quickly understand what is going on in the world of DCOM so that you can create COM clients and servers easily. We do that starting at the beginning and laying things out for you simply and in the right order. By the time you finish these tutorials you will understand all of the basic concepts driving DCOM and you will be able to proceed quickly to learn the rest. You will be amazed at how easy DCOM can be once you get a good start.

• The Basics of COM - the best place to start is at the beginning...
• Simple COM clients - COM clients are easy
• Simple COM servers - using the ATL wizard to build a server