With the increasing importance of computer networks, it has become necessary for clients and servers to interact easily and efficiently, whether they reside on the same machine or across a network. Crucial to this is the ability of a client to be able to launch a server, create an instance of the server's object, and have access to the methods of the interfaces on the object.
COM now provides extensions to this basic COM process that make it virtually seamless across a network. As before, if a client is able to identify the server through its CLSID, calling a few simple functions permit COM to do all the work of locating and launching the server, and activating the object. New subkeys have been added to the registry that allow remote servers to register their location, so the client does not require that information. For applications that want to take advantage of networking features, new capabilities have been added to the object creation functions that allow more flexibility and efficiency.
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