[pjmlp]

Here are some good COM books.

Essential COM by Don Box

https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465

Inside COM by Dale Rogerson

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Microsoft-Programming-Dale-Rog...

Then if you have access to public libraries, maybe one of them has one of the several Microsoft Systems Journals issues, later MSDN Magazine, with plenty of low level COM articles.

COM is from the days where good documentation was to be found in books, not on the Interwebs.

[teh_klev]

+1 for Essential COM by Don Box, it still survives my bookshelf purges..."just-in-case". IUnknown and IDispatch are burned permanently in my memory from a period of my life building a COM/CORBA bridge.

[alxlaz]

I'm gonna piggyback on your comment to give another shout out to Essential COM. I haven't touched COM in ages but that book is so good I still pick it up every once in a while -- and it was a lifesaver back when I did touch COM on a daily basis.

[taude]

Wow, that's a throw back to the late 90s, early 2000s. I'm still slightly scarred from working with ATL and COM. A lot of people around here would probably be surprised to hear that there were even Python -> COM bindings back in the day that were even used to ship server software once upon a time. Anyway, I remember that Don Box book well.

[ptx]

Not only "back in the day" – those COM bindings for Python were most recently updated last month: https://pypi.org/project/pywin32/#history

I highly recommend using them if you're ever forced to work with VBA and need to implement some non-trivial functionality.

[contextfree]

There are also new Python bindings for WinRT (which is based on COM): https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang/tree/master/src/package/p...

[mycall]

IronPython supports .NET Core which supports COM

[7thaccount]

Yea...Python and Powershell are the only languages that I know of outside C#/VBA/VB.NET with decent COM support. I hate COM, but it works.

[pjmlp]

Delphi, Eiffel as well.

[7thaccount]

True... I've looked at Delphi, but at this point I doubt the license fee is worth it compared to say C#. I've never known anyone who actually used Eiffel though.

[crtlaltdel]

oh how i wish i knew this back when...or just looked harder i guess ;)

[holy_city]

thank you!

[vic20forever]

archive.org has the following pre-dotnet edition of MSDN Library - you'll find a lot of COM info in it:

https://archive.org/details/MSDN_Library_October_2001_Disc_1

https://archive.org/details/MSDN_Library_October_2001_Disc_2

https://archive.org/details/MSDN_Library_October_2001_Disc_3