>A few months back I attended a User Group Meeting where Ken Levy was speaking on XML. He mentioned that "COM was dead". He continued to compare COM with DDE - saying that it's still available but no one is using it.
>
>I don't quite understand why he would say this - do you?

Only in the sense that XML will be used to pass data back and forth instead of COM. However, much of .Net is based on COM. In fact, it was originally called COM+ 2.0. In the full sense of COM, it is very much alive.