Component based development has shown to be a promising technology to
support the development of flexible software applications and to
promote the reuse of software. The component technology of Microsoft
Windows has until this moment proven to find the most widespread use,
partly due to success of Microsoft Windows itself. 

The component technology has been marketed under a number of different
names: OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), ActiveX and COM/DCOM
(Distributed Component Object Model). (D)COM is the name of the
underlying technology and it is an embedded service in the Microsoft
Windows family of operating systems.

In this document a summary of the evaluation of COM based development
in four different development environments is presented. The
environments evaluated are:

 · Borland Delphi version 3.01
 · Microsoft Visual J++ version 1.1
 · Microsoft Visual Basic version 5.0 and
 · Microsoft Visual C++ version 5.0 using ATL version 2.1