What s Next?

Whats Next ?

Well, in terms of our product, I think the customer is likely to ask us to do the embedded COM object, partly because it might work a bit better, but mostly because our customer wants us to have to solve a hard problem here in the book. (As youll see, this was not the hard problem we ended up having to solve.) So Ive done one more thing. Ive browsed the book sites for COM .NET and found at least two books in existence that describe how to do COM- .NET interoperation . Im going to see if I can find one or both of those in Ann Arbor, and Ill take a look at them. On another day, Id just order one, but I happen to be heading to the bookstore.

You might be thinking that thats a pretty expensive way to do business. Those books will cost me forty or fifty dollars each. Whats up with that? In my opinion, thats a pretty cheap way to provide myself with information on how to do what I have to do. How many good ideas do you need to get from a book before its worth the price? Not many. In the case of COM and .NET, Ill settle for one or two, and Im sure to find that many.

Still, Im almost sorry that this didnt turn out to be harder to do. Yet thats often the way of it. We take a seemingly hard program, chip at it with a little surfing and a spike or two, and the next thing you know, we dont have a hard problem anymore. That might be the real lesson of this chapter. For those who want to see me suffer, I promise: I know there are some hard ones coming up.