Despite all the flexibility that distributed component computing will bring us, there are vital missing pieces in the COM/DCOM puzzle that will prevent the immediate widespread deployment of the technology. This has little impact on self-contained project development environments, such as our Aberdeen & Wilshire intranet. However, these shortcomings do surface as problems that we must solve in an ad hoc manner on a per-project basis unless they are addressed by the system vendor. We'll examine several of these 'missing links' in this section.