I’m incredibly stoked about the latest MSDN article about registration-free COM. True, it only works on XP, and I have no environment remotely like that at work (I think we’re going to jump to XP shortly after we roll out 2000. Yes, we’re racing against Longhorn. Pity us.), but the time’s coming pretty soon. One of the biggest problems with enterprise development is the testing cycle that’s required to make sure that no application contributor does anything to interfere with any other application. With .Net and XCOPY deployment, we were close, but there’s always some legacy COM code that needs to be around, and once you’re registering objects, you lose the ability to say that you’re definitely not straying from your playground (yes, I intentionally avoided daying “sandbox”). It’s not perfect (doesn’t work with ActiveX EXEs, for example), but this will go a long way to easing DLL dependencies. Like I said, stoked.
That’s mostly from a desktop developer’s perspective, but I also need to check out side by side assemblies in WinXP and 2K.
It’s highly likely that there are simply a billion different technology groups at play at MSFT, but I’m going to go with the theory that the company’s finally recognizing that .NET isn’t the be all and end all of app development, and neither is Avalon/Indigo/whatever. VB6 retirement notwithstanding, it’s nice to see some kind of (inferred) acknowledgment of COM’s future. Let’s hope there’s a migration path that doesn’t make it the next DOS.
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