COM or .NET

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Guest

is COM used widely nowadys or is .NET the best thing to use nowadys?if yes
what type of applications is COM mainly used for developing?

what type of applications .NET not suitable for?
 
Technically you can use either of them for any task. Chances are that legacy
code would probably be using COM, in which case, you may want to continue
using that - though you could migrate partially to .NET and use COM-interop.
For new work, it may be smarter to use .NET - whatever anyone else says, COM
is for all practical purposes a soon-to-be-obsolete technology.

Also note that .NET is a lot simpler to use than COM. You'd find more
programmers comfortable with .NET than with COM. .NET apps are easier to
debug, deploy and support. You'd have access to the extensive BCL.
 
First, it actually depends on your purpose. Do you want to deal with
web services, database access, etc? Then use .NET. If you want to deal
with Internet Explorer, shell, and things that need _more_ control
overall, then use COM.

..NET today uses COM as well. COM is something Microsoft has been using
for years and almost everything is built on COM. It's sometimes painful
to deal with COM, but it's a strong architecture actually. It'll take a
long time to bury COM.

As far as I have examined, .NET (inluding 2.0) is not suitable for
applications reusing web browser control (e.g. where is NewWindow2
handler? Any doc explaining how to return/set external dispatch?). It
doesn't mean it's _impossible_ to write those applications in .NET, but
it means you need to write interop code, etc. to work with native COM
interfaces.

..NET, however, is great for web services and database applications, and
many more types of applications. There are only a few points, as far as
I know, where .NET needs a bit more, which are mostly those
COM-dependent cases. It's a great technology.

Ismail
 
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