C++Builder 5 Developers Guide

by Mark Cashman

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Is DCOM?

• The DCOMCnfg Utility Tool

• Field Testing DCOM

• Programming Security

COM objects are an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system today.

More and more of the Windows operating system services are being exposed in the form of COM objects, which are taking the place of traditional Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from DLLs.

Until recently, COM objects suffered from one big weakness ”they could only be used from within the confines of a single computer. It was impossible to move the components to different machines on the network to create a distributed system.

To address this problem, Microsoft created DCOM. DCOM extends COM by providing the capability to activate COM objects remotely. But, DCOM also introduces new security and programming issues.