[pjmlp]

I had to chuckle when I read the "Bad Tooling" section, because anyone that has had to deal with COM and DCOM, is painfully aware how much better the development experience with gRPC happens to be, and is incredible how bad the COM/DCOM tooling still is after 30 years, given its key role as Windows API, specially since Vista.

Not even basic syntax highlighting for IDL files in Visual Studio, but nice goodies for doing gRPC are available in Visual Studio.

[pjc50]

> nice goodies for doing gRPC are available in Visual Studio.

Could you elaborate on this? (Heavy grpc/C# usage here and we just edit the protos)

[pjmlp]

Imagine that instead of what you do with gRPC/C#, you had to edit proto files just like using Notepad (so is the COM IDL editing experience in VS), and instead of having VS take care of the C# code generation, you either call the MIDL CLI compiler yourself, or manually integrate it on some build step, only to open the folder of generated code, and then manually merge it with your existing code inside of Visual Studio.

That is the gold experience for doing COM in C++, doing COM in C# is somehow better, but still you won't get rid of dealing with IDL files, specially now that TLB support is no longer available for .NET Core.

Quite tragic for such key technology, meanwhile C++ Builder offers a much more developer friendly experience.