Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 28. Chapters: Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Applet, Distributed Component Object Model, Newi, Dependency injection, Teechart, VP/MS, Component Pascal, Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture, OBJREF, Component repository management, Composition over inheritance, Microsoft Transaction Server, Visual Component Library, International Components for Unicode, Component Manager, Bonobo, RCOS, Component diagram, Windows Media Components for QuickTime, MSDAIPP, Third-party software component, Xiph QuickTime Components, NMath, EntireX, OPC Historical Data Access, Component Library for Cross Platform, DHTMLEdit, Business domain, Runtime Callable Wrapper, Physlet, Universal Interface Language, Common Component Architecture, Microsoft Interface Definition Language. Excerpt: Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft in 1993. It is used to enable interprocess communication and dynamic object creation in a large range of programming languages. The term COM is often used in the Microsoft software development industry as an umbrella term that encompasses the OLE, OLE Automation, ActiveX, COM+ and DCOM technologies. The essence of COM is a language-neutral way of implementing objects that can be used in environments different from the one in which they were created, even across machine boundaries. For well-authored components, COM allows reuse of objects with no knowledge of their internal implementation, as it forces component implementers to provide well-defined interfaces that are separate from the implementation. The different allocation semantics of languages are accommodated by making objects responsible for their own creation and destruction through reference-counting. Casting between different interfaces of an object is achieved through the QueryInterface...