One of the problems with COM is that it requires entries in the registry. A .NET application instead lives inside an assembly, which contains metadata (security, version and file information) about your application's EXE and DLL, and does not use the registry. Its kind of like a replacement for the registry. An assembly can be private, living inside of the subdirectory with your application, or Global to the machine. Because of this arrangement, different versions of your classes can live side by side, thus ending "DLL hell". Deployment of an app in .NET can be done simply with a copy command.

Microsoft does realize that there is an enormous amount of code that is built with COM. Communication between .NET and COM objects is accomplished with Interop Services. .NET will create a wrapper around your COM class so that it can be called from .NET . Also it will create a wrapper around a .NET object so that it is callable from a COM object.

Web services are the replacement to COM. You can consume web services with SOAP, which is based on XML and therefore independent of Windows, unlike COM which only runs on Windows.

Look at Rick's aticle on .NET and web services http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/dotnetwebservices/DotNetWebServices.asp.

I encourage you to learn all you can about .NET, because I believe it will be vitally important to developers over the next couple of years.

-Dave


>Hi all,
>
>I have a question which is prompted from something that another non-VFP developer said during a meeting today. Note that he is pushing to have everything re-engineered with .NET...
>
>He made a statement saying that "COM and COM+ will be obsolete technologies within 1-2 years".
>
>Since Microsoft is pushing all (ok, not all, but much) of it's focus to .NET, and (according to the other developer) .NET does something different than COM/COM+, what is the replacement for COM+?
>
>Is his statement even true? If so, what is one to do to prepare for the "demise" of COM? If we are not to use COM, what do we use? Do those of us who use VFP have to wait for ".NET support" (whatever the hell that means)?
>
>Granted, I still need to do my research on all the .NET stuff (and probably quickly from the sounds of things), but I just would like to know if this guy is just blowing smoke so that a project goes "his way".
>
>
>Thanks,
>
>- Brian