Well, that's definitely what the future is all about. Distributed applications is where it's at. I'm amazed how long it's taken for many people to realize this. We've been pushing this technology for over 3 years now and I've been using those concepts for about that same timeframe taking advantage of the Web as a distributed network. XML and technologies like SOAP are just making that more standard in ways that's really paying off.

I'm not convinced that BizTalk is the answer that MS wants us to believe in, but the underlying XML and SOAP mechanisms will take off. It takes a lot of infrastructure to make this work out right though. The Service model for software distribution is very different and imposes totally different restraints than shrink wrap software does today. For example, there are issues of uptime and who's responsible on failures in B2B scenarios etc.

You might want to pick up the latest issue of Code and read my editorial. I discussed the whole service model in some detail...


As far as COM goes, I think it's not dead just being relegated as a lower level technology that you may or may not have to mess with directly. COM will have to continue to work as it does today - hell, Windows uses COM extensively.

OTOH, I think it's a good thing that it's going that route, because there are just too many things wrong with the COM model (particular the threading issues) to make for a reliable scalable platform. We'll see how .NET will really change that, but the main issues - threading and deployment - at least seem to have been addressed.