For those of you who have worked with COM and especially ATL, you might be saddened to hear people mention that they are being slowly phased out as the .NET platform becomes more mainstream. Although this may certainly be the case, I don't believe it will happen anytime soon. Too many COM objects are currently in the marketplace, and to disable their functionality would have disastrous results. Furthermore, a new ATL feature, ATL Server, was introduced with Visual Studio .NET, which goes to show that Microsoft is still committed to COM and the powerful ATL library.
During this hour, you saw how COM Interop plays a big role when you need to use existing objects within the .NET Framework. Also, you saw how some of the newer .NET objects can be used within older COM-based applications. Without this interoperability model in place, you would have no choice but to spend time and money converting code bases to support the new technologies.
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