How Should I Read This Paper?

This White Paper is the first in a series introducing COM and DCOM. This paper provides a high-level explanation of design issues that are addressed by DCOM:

• Location independence
• Connection management
• Scalability
• Performance
• Bandwidth and latency
• Security
• Load balancing
• Fault tolerance
• Ease of deployment
• Protocol neutrality
• Platform neutrality
• Seamless integration with other Internet protocols

Start with this paper, then refer to others in the series for details on specific topics

If you are wondering how to apply DCOM to specific applications and solutions, take a look at [DCOM - Solutions in Action] to get an idea of what others have done. There is a good chance that you will be able to apply many of the ideas in these solutions to your own work.

If you really want to understand how everything works and fits together, see Most of the papers referenced in this whitepaper are available on the Technology Preview CD. URLs to documents which are available for download are listed below.

[DCOM - Architecture]. Take this guided tour of the inner and outer workings of DCOM and you'll see for yourself how DCOM realizes the promise of easy distributed computing without compromising flexibility, scalability, or robustness.

This paper introduces you to the world of distributed computing. It shows you some problem areas that you will, or might already have, run into and gives you some ideas about how you can solve these problems using the unique features of DCOM.

For fast readers, each major section of this White Paper contains a summarizing paragraph that is highlighted like this one. If you need to skip a section, be sure to read at least this summary.