Note - Supplementary Resources

Notes about this course:

1. We will spend a significant amount of time - about three weeks - discussing the Windows COM technology. COM is a Component Technology used throughout windows to break this large and complex system into digestible, composable, and nearly independent pieces. COM was developed to support some interesting technologies with the Office Suite and has grown to become a major part of the Windows OS. COM components are the building blocks for:
   • the Windows shell
   • Windows Management Instrumentation
   • Internet Explorer
   • .Net CLR
   • the new WinRT technolgy used in Windows 8
   • throughout Microsoft Office
   If you work professionally on a Windows platform you will need to understand how COM works. That is the reason for our emphasis here. Note that there is no corresponding technology on Linux, so this part of the course will forgo interoperability.
2. Our interest in interoperability also focuses on interoperation of components built in different technologies, e.g., between native and managed code. For Linux that means interoperation between Java and C++ using operating system facilities like sockets and pipes. On Windows we will look at interoperability between C# and C++ code in several ways. You can even inteoperate between scripts and native code on both platforms.