Hello, I just saw this thread, which led me to ponder a question that I've never asked - what is COM and what is it useful for? Back when I was dabbling in DirectX programming, I had some limited exposure to COM and I must say that I didn't enjoy working with it very much. Maybe someone can change that for me... Thanks in advance!

Short answer: COM is a binary standard that allows different languages to use the same OOP objects. It's a pretty sweet idea (I'm a fan of it), but it's a pain to program in C/C++, as you have to handle all kinds of crap yourself (stuff that is automatically generated for other languages like VB). .NET is kind of the new COM, where most of the crap is handled for you (yeah, yeah, there's other stuff, like MSIL, and all that, which doesn't directly relate to COM).