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The two most popular standards today for reusing objects in distributed environments are Object Management Group's (OMG) CORBA and Microsoft's COM. Instead of an either/or choice, however, many programming shops face the prospect of integrating both technologies. This book is a valuable roadmap for getting CORBA and COM to coexist peacefully using Visual Basic. This guide first looks at the new tools that allow CORBA and COM to work together. (Both authors contributed to the OMG COM/CORBA Internetworking Standard, so they are highly familiar with the tools.) The book offers good coverage of CORBA basics, including basic philosophy and the nuts and bolts of its Interface Definition Language (IDL) and data types. The authors detail how to map data types back and forth between CORBA and COM. Short, effective programming samples illustrate the basics of calling CORBA methods from within Visual Basic. Advanced chapters look at such topics as exception handling and using COM/CORBA on the Internet. Throughout Integrating CORBA and COM Applications, the authors stress a role for COM on the client and CORBA on the server. The authors largely ignore Microsoft's recent attempts to bring COM to the enterprise with DCOM and the emerging COM+ standard. But for integrating older-style COM components with legacy CORBA services, this guide can serve as an absolutely indispensable resource. --Richard Dragan