The Microsoft Way: COM, OLE/Activex, COM+, and .NET CLR
8557 Chapter 15 p329-380 8/10/02 12:24 pm Page 329 CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Microsoft way: COM, OLE/ActiveX, COM+, and .NET CLR In a sense, Microsoft is taking the easiest route. Instead of proposing a global standard and hoping to port its own systems to it, it continually re-engineers its existing application and platform base. Component technology is intro- duced gradually, gaining leverage from previous successes, such as the original Visual Basic controls (VBX – non-object-oriented components!), object link- ing and embedding (OLE), OLE database connectivity (ODBC), ActiveX, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), or active server pages (ASP). In the standards arena, Microsoft focuses mostly on internet (IETF) and web (W3C) standards. More recently, some of its .NET specifications (CLI and C#) where adopted by ECMA – a European standards body with a fast track to ISO (ECMA, 2001a, 2001b). Microsoft is not trying to align its approaches with OMG or Java standards. While Java figured prominently in Microsoft’s strategy for a while, it has been relegated to a mere continuation of support of its older Visual J++ product – in part as a result of a settlement between Sun and Microsoft. In addition, under the name Visual J# .NET, Microsoft offers a migration tool to .NET, primarily targeting users of Visual J++ 6.0. As part of the .NET initiative, Microsoft is promoting language neutrality as a major tenet of CLR and aims to establish a new language, C#. C# adopts many of the successful traits of Java, while adding several distinctive features of its own (such as value types) and not supporting key Java features (such as inner classes).
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