Is DCOM still viable?

[Robert Dunnill]

I'm finishing off a degree, and the last credits I have outstanding involve a "real world" client/server project. I was hoping to base the architecture on DCOM, using components crafted in ATL 7, but I have concerns about obsolescence.

Anyone have any thoughts? Is it possible to implement Web services in DCOM and ATL 7 (I'm a total noob here)? Or is DCOM toast, meaning I should use .NET instead?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks, RD

[kuphryn]

Learn COM/DCOM, but focus on .NET. No matter what developer say, I still think COM/DCOM is Visual Basic oriented.

Kuphryn

[darwen]

In my experience DCOM had far too many problems to ever make it a viable way of communicating over a network (the setup was horrible - especially getting the permissions right, didn't work across domains, single threaded DCOM servers could hang infinitely etc etc).

I think Microsoft has given up and stopped supporting it now.

I would have expected the .NET way would be much better. Or using raw sockets (which is what I use).

Socket servers aren't that difficult to write, and much much more stable.

Darwen.