Larry Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > recently learned that you can ship COM as either an .EXE or a .DLL (nobody > has yet let me know why).
The "why" is pretty obvious -- you may want to be able to instantiate a COM object either in-process, or in its own separate process, depending on that object's nature. For example, a complete application that when running exposes COM objects to let other processes drive/script it will be an EXE file since it can also run independently. In general I'm no big fan of MS's design, but COM, despite its imperfections, was in fact seriously good (Don Box's "Essential COM", an excellent book, went just into enough depth to let a developer really appreciate that, IMHO). I'm using the past tense because MS has been trying to kill COM for a while now (but I notice that "Essential COM", while 10 years-old, is _still_ in stock at Amazon -- so, I guess that so far MS's attempts haven't _quite_ succeeded yet:-). Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
