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COM Terminology

apartment managed processing

Execution management processing that is part of the COM threading architecture. Apartments are used to allow access to individual instances of COM objects. An individual instance of a COM object lives in exactly one apartment. Apartments can be either single-threaded or multi-threaded. Calls to methods to a COM object within a single-threaded apartment are synchronized by the apartment's thread by making use of the Windows message queue. In contrast, a multi-threaded apartment can have one or more threads servicing calls to the methods of the associated COM object instance. The object itself must synchronize calls to COM object methods in a multi-threaded apartment.

COM—see Component Object Model

Component Object Model (COM)

A Microsoft object-oriented programming model that defines how objects interact within a single application or between applications. COM's architecture lets applications and systems be constructed using components supplied by different software vendors.

COM+

Microsoft's next step in the Component Object Model evolution. COM+ is a service oriented and handles many of the resource management tasks previously performed by application code. Applications that use COM+ objects automatically become more scalable by such facilities of thread pooling, object pooling, and just-in-time object activation. COM+ also provides distributed transaction support letting transactions span multiple databases and applications spread across a network.

DCOM—see Distributed COM

Distributed COM (DCOM)

Extends support of Microsoft's COM implementation to support communication between objects deployed to different computers connected to a network.

GUID—see Globally Unique Identifier

Globally Unique Identifier (GUID)

A 16-byte code used to uniquely identify interfaces to objects spread across all computers and networks.

IIS—see Internet Information Server

Internet Information Server (IIS)

An integrated Windows service offered Microsoft for hosting Internet or Intranet applications on various Windows platforms.

in-process

An application isolation level that lets a web application be loaded and run from within application server process space within IIS. The Web applications that execute in process are not isolated from one another. It is possible for a misbehaved Web application executing in process to effect other applications configured to run in process.

registration

The process of adding data to the Windows registry.

registry

A central, hierarchical database maintained in Windows used to store configuration information for the system or users of the system. The registry contains information that is constantly accessed during operation. The information includes such items as user profiles, application profiles and hardware properties.

out-of-process

An application isolation level within IIS that causes that associated application to run within its own execution environment. The process associated with the Web base request executes as part of a separate dllhost.exe process. The Web processing designated to execute as out-of-process is isolated from all other Web applications.