I like COM as concept, what is awful beyond explanation is why it being so central to WinDev, it keeps having pre-historic support on Visual Studio.
IDL files still lack code completion and syntax highlighting, 25 years later, and they cannot settle on any kind of framework that makes it easier to use.
From .NET side there are still gotchas to this day, and from C++ side it seems we cannot just have nice tools.
Now as a concept it is quite cool, execution could be so much better.
Oddly enough if you used COM in VB6 it had autocomplete and tight integration with it. Building the objects in c++ was a nightmare, but it did work for great reusable components.
From Microsoft history of programming languages, VB 6 was definitly the best COM experience so far, for a little while .NET Native and C++/CX got it back, but they are now deprecated.
Comments
I like COM as concept, what is awful beyond explanation is why it being so central to WinDev, it keeps having pre-historic support on Visual Studio.
IDL files still lack code completion and syntax highlighting, 25 years later, and they cannot settle on any kind of framework that makes it easier to use.
From .NET side there are still gotchas to this day, and from C++ side it seems we cannot just have nice tools.
Now as a concept it is quite cool, execution could be so much better.
Oddly enough if you used COM in VB6 it had autocomplete and tight integration with it. Building the objects in c++ was a nightmare, but it did work for great reusable components.
From Microsoft history of programming languages, VB 6 was definitly the best COM experience so far, for a little while .NET Native and C++/CX got it back, but they are now deprecated.
I’d guess very little people are touching COM directly and more commonly using whatever various abstractions MS built on top.
The only abstractiosn that exist are .NET libraries, when they don't exist, then COM is all that there is, nothing else.