Will anything ever replace ActiveX?

It's an ugly dog. I want to move my application away from it but it seems to still be the way for users' Excel, etc. scripts to interact with applications.

There's this .Net Remoting, but that doesn't seem to be used by hardly anything.

Windows itself is strongly COM based and many Windows applications are as well. I'm not sure what you'd think of as "pretty" by comparison. In most of the non-Windows world you won't find anything even close that can be considered a platform standard, and nothing native.

The stuff in .Net is much like the Java equivalents, an ad-hoc agglomeration of technologies. Some of these are based on Web Service techniques while others are based on a mixed bag of native transports like Named Pipes or RPC/DCOM, and .Net-proprietary creations like Remoting. WCF was poorly named, and by rights should have been called .Net Communication Foundation. Windows itself is barely aware of it.

The focus in .Net was on distributed more than desktop applications. This may change more over time. But if anything most of the change so far seems to have been improved interoperation with the COM world rather than the world changing to fit .Net's view of reality.


Far down the road I'd expect to see COM/DCOM evolve into something a little more .Net-like and vice versa. That might be very far off though.

OK cheers. So it's worth some investment in time and shouldn't disappear soon.

I imagine pretty would be something that has a single 'interface' or 'way to access it' by clients. Not with a seperate, losable and user-confusing type library. And which doesn't require manually setting a dozen obscure and seemingly redundant registry keys. And most importantly that doesn't cause users to email my saying "it says it can't create object, what's wrong?".

Ah well we're allowed to dream aren't we? :P