Component Object Model Communication Fundamentals and its Components

COM (Component Object Model) is the fastest growing model. Microsoft exposes any new technology by implementing each new subsystem as a COM object. COM is the way to interact with subsystems like ADSI (Active Directory Services Interface), MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server), DirectX, Shell extensions, ActiveX controls, OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding) and ActiveX scripting. The central tenet of COM is the concept of language independence. COM based components can be built in wide variety of development environments. So it is better for windows developers to understand the core infrastructure of COM. This understanding will enable you to easily take advantage of those new subsystems as well as make it easier for you to expose your own subsystems.