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Life As a Windows DNA Programmer

To further complicate matters, there is a little thing called the Internet. Over the last several years,

Microsoft has been adding more Internet-aware features into its family of operating systems and

products. Sadly, building a web application using COM-based Windows Distributed interNet Appli-

cations Architecture (DNA) is also quite complex.

Some of this complexity is due to the simple fact that Windows DNA requires the use of numer-

ous technologies and languages (ASP, HTML, XML, JScript, VBScript, and COM[+], as well as a data

access API such as ADO). One problem is that many of these technologies are completely unrelated

from a syntactic point of view. For example, JScript has a syntax much like C, while VBScript is a

subset of VB6. The COM servers that are created to run under the COM+ runtime have an entirely

different look and feel from the ASP pages that invoke them. The result is a highly confused mish-

mash of technologies.

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Furthermore, and perhaps more important, each language and/or technology has its own type

system (that may look nothing like another’s type system). Beyond the fact that each API ships with

its own collection of prefabricated code, even basic data types cannot always be treated identically.

A CComBSTR in ATL is not quite the same as a String in VB6, both of which have nothing to do with a

char* in C.