We're about to experience one of the major benefits of designing component objects based on COM technology. Our objects will become network-ready without any extra work! We'll make this happen in this chapter. We'll also take a more in-depth look at the technology behind this magic: DCOM (or Distributed COM). We'll investigate how DCOM provides an object-based communications service to both DCOM-aware and legacy COM-only objects. We'll attempt to answer the question: why DCOM? We'll examine a couple of the nuts-and-bolts technologies beneath the DCOM covers that may affect us when creating DCOM based applications. And we'll briefly examine the question of security, just enough to understand some of the security fences that our ActiveX control has to jump over during a typical deployment situation, leaving most of the details for Chapter 9. Penultimately, we'll take a cold, hard look at some of the shortcomings of creating distributed component-based applications using today's technology. Coverage will be given to some upcoming technologies that Microsoft is working with to overcome some of these difficulties.
Putting some of our new knowledge to work, we will DCOM-enable our ATL based Dept object server. We'll walk through a step-by-step experiment configuring a network with three machines and testing our Aberdeen & Wilshire Calendar application with cooperating components running on the network of machines.