Is COM dead? [closed]

Question

What are profound advantages that one get when using COM for developing components over the WCF? Is there anything that can be done with COM and not with WCF?

Answer 1

No it's not dead yet, but it's on its death-bed, that's for sure. You see there's still to many legacy systems that use/require COM, that assures us it'll be with us for a few more years, but not in the long-run.

As for WCF, there might be some edge cases of stuff COM can do, and WCF can't, but more importantly, and related to legacy stuff, is that there are COM bindings for almost every language you can put on a windows stack, but the WCF bindings are not ready yet for everyone (languages)

Answer 2

Depends on how deep into the system you want to dig. COM will never 'die', same as unmanaged languages never will.

To make long story short, if you develop desktop applications for Vista+, you probably won't need to bother using COM anymore.

Answer 3

I don't think COM is dead. If you look at the Vista, it uses so much of COM architecture/technology. Every thing in Vista is a COM Dll/Exe. I feel when compared to XP, Vista uses so much of COM.

If we want to extend any thing in Vista we have to implement interfaces using COM.