Luckily, with all those ATL macros and wizards available, resp. with COM-specific annotations in case of .NET, COM development became a lot easier over the years. Still, I would recommend everyone who is programming in COM, or even just reusing an existing COM component, to at least once walk through the complete process of manually implementing and registrating a COM component (including ClassFactory and hand-written registration code), to find out what's going on under the hood. A very nice step-by-step tuorial can be found at
codeguru.com.
