Has .NET made raw COM and DCOM programming redundant?

Question

Has the introduction of the .net framework made raw programming in COM and DCOM redundant ?

(Except for using some COM+ services, e.g. for transaction management through the System.EnterpriseServices namespace)

Answer 1

Not yet, because the OS is still unmanaged.

If MS finally do what their labs have been talking about for years and produce a fully managed OS then it will.

That OS won't be backwards compatible though. They would have to produce managed versions of Office, IE, etc first. They will have to produce a virtual machine to run unmanaged apps.

The pain would be something similar to the move from Mac OS9 to OSX.

Answer 2

COM was the last major technology that MS actually dogfooded. MS are continuing to build new APIs that depend on COM; for example, Vista's new Media Foundation (a kind of successor to DirectShow, which was also COM-based) is a COM API. So is Direct3D10 (and I would assume D3D11). I don't think it's going to disappear any time soon, and for a lot of Windows programming tasks it's not at all redundant.