Alan Gordon - The .NET and COM interoperability handbook

At the company for which I work we have just begun the process of planning our migration to .NET. This process has been fraught with both political and technical challenges. The purpose of this book is to help you with the technical challenges of .NET migration, in particular using COM Interop. The only help I can give you on the political challenges is: Beware of people who want to use .NET just because it's cool, because Microsoft says you should, or to pad their resume. Also, beware of people who don't want to use .NET because of personal biases against Microsoft. Decisions about what technologies should be used should be based on business objectives first, customer satisfaction second, and ease of development and maintenance third. Other agendas must be brushed aside.

But enough about politics, this is a technical book with a target audience of intermediate to advanced COM/COM+ programmers who are looking to make the move to .NET. I assume some knowledge of COM and COM+, but I don't assume any prior knowledge of .NET. This book also functions as a .NET tutorial for COM programmers. I start from first principles defining at an advanced level all of the technologies in the .NET Framework. I have included chapters on the CLR, a one-chapter tutorial on the C# programming language, and chapters on .NET Web Services, and .NET Remoting. All of these chapters are there to provide you with the foundational knowledge that you need to understand the meat of the book, which is the pure Interop material in , which cover advanced topics in Interop, are particularly beefy chapters.

My pedagogical style in writing is similar to the teaching style that I have used at UCLA Extension. My approach when teaching new concepts is as follows:

Most of the chapters start by explaining the problem that the .NET technology that you are about to learn about will solve. Next we discuss how this .NET-related technology works and how you will use it. You will find lots of analogies, diagrams and screen shots. Finally, in most of the chapters we will build a demonstration program. I don't think any of the demonstration programs are terribly sophisticated (they weren't meant to be). The example programs are designed to reinforce the topic in that chapter. I show you how to build the example program in enough detail that a beginning C# programmer should have no problem following along. I think you will learn the most by following along and building the example programs yourself, but if you don't want to go through the steps yourself, you can download the demonstration programs from the Web site for this book. The URL for the Web site is: www.objectinnovations.com/dotnet.htm. A link is provided at that Web site for downloading the sample programs for this book.

The sample programs are provided in a self-extracting file. When expanded, a directory structure is created, rooted in c:\OI\NetCom. The sample programs are in directories Chap01, Chap02, and so on. All the samples for a given chapter are in individual folders within the chapter directories. The names of the folders are clearly identified in the text. This book is part of the Integrated .NET Series. The sample programs for other books in the series are located in their own directories underneath c:\OI, so all the .NET examples from all books in the series will be located in a common area as you install them.