While Windows lives, it's hard to see how COM will ever die.

This is a nice piece by Tim Anderson on why COM is still alive and kicking despite what all the .Net-heads would have you believe…

It always seemed to be pretty obvious to me that all the “COM is dead, long live .Net” hype was just that, hype. Whilst there are obvious advantages to using .Net for new projects there are a lot of projects out there in the wild where you can’t just throw away all of the investment that has been made in COM. Also, as Tim points out, .Net doesn’t really have replacements for all of the ways that COM has been used over the years… It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me that Vista still has COM deeply entwined and that new stuff coming out of Microsoft itself still makes heavy use of COM; just as I’m not at all surprised that the hype machines were off target about how Longhorn/Vista would be managed code from the ground up. This stuff may be “legacy” as far as Microsoft’s hype generation crowd is concerned but it’s going to be there for a long, long, time and don’t be too surprised if Microsoft keeps using these legacy things in their own applications.