Handling COM Components

Alas, poor ActiveX and COM components. Or, to paraphrase Stephen King and Peter Straub (from the excellent novel Black House ), perhaps it is time to let this technology stretch out in its grave. What's that you say? You can't? I understand.

If you must insist on carrying COM and ActiveX controls into the future with you ”out of necessity, of course ”your application may not be ideal for smart client behavior. All is not lost though. The Terrarium game offers a hybrid solution that may work for you. Provide your customers with a traditional installation. This can be accomplished by mailing a CD-ROM or DVD or providing download access from the Web. Then, managed parts of your solution can be updated using smart client techniques. It may be difficult or impossible to update COM or ActiveX portions of your application without qualified user intercession, but you should be able to update the managed .NET assemblies without it.

Of course, if you are using bleeding-edge techniques like smart clients , I encourage you to reimplement the COM pieces in .NET. You are up to the challenge.