Summary

Writers have the mixed blessing of getting to look at (and struggle with) new products pretty early in their life cycles. I have been working with .NET for several years now and am still thrilled at its number of facets.

As you have seen in this chapter, the support for COM Interop is tremendous. What amazes me is that a couple of other authors wrote 700+-page books on COM Interop alone. Clearly the tools are getting better all the time, but the demand for what software must do is growing at an equally impressive pace. This suggests that we are going to need more specialists to understand the intricacies of our complex business.

Chapter 7 showed that you do not have to abandon good-quality COM-based code. You can bring all your COM code into .NET and even take some new .NET code to the old world for use in COM-based clients . If you are creating a new solution, I encourage you to use all .NET code, but .NET doesn't require that you do so.