Visual Basic and COM

With the web's expansion Microsoft needed a viable technology to service web clients. They decided to use one of their most powerful technologies and adapt it to the web, COM. COM (see definition below) is made of up compiled components. Its data access is unlimited and its speed and versatility incredibly extensive. Webworld has understood and worked in Visual Basic (VB) COM for many years now. Its speed, reliability and versatility has worked well for many past projects.

COM is a Microsoft technology working in conjunction with Visual Basic Script (VBScript) and Active Server Pages (ASP), on a Microsoft server platform such as NT Server or Windows 2000. We believe COM and VB represent Microsoft's fastest and most reliable Internet technologies to date--although in the years to come this technology may be replaced by the various technologies comprising Microsoft's .NET initiative.

Webworld has experienced VB/COM developers available for any requirement from application development to building components.

What Is COM?

This is an acronym for Component Object Model. It is a component software architecture from Microsoft which defines a structure for building program routines (objects) that can be called up and executed in a Windows environment. COM provides the interfaces between objects, and Distributed COM (DCOM) allows them to run remotely.

COM is easily confused with other Microsoft terminology and technology. Microsoft first used the term OLE (Object Linking & Embedding) to refer to its COM-based architecture, then later dropped that designation in favor of ActiveX. Since both OLE and ActiveX are based on COM, the term COM is also used. As a result, any combination of the words COM, OLE and ActiveX followed by the words control, object and component may mean the same thing--or they may not, depending on context.

Definitions from Computer Language Company Inc.