DCOM is
Distributed COM, a standard backed by Microsoft. The idea here is that it is a flavor of
COM that takes into account how items that you may be acessing
invisibly may be on other
machines over the
wire. Making
RPC calls versus
LPC calls can be quite
expensive in the performance department.
DCOM is one of the main reasons why each true
COM method returns an
HRESULT (and information into an outward bound pointer). Because you must have a way for a
network error to fail out without actually calling the
function, returning an HRESULT is better than strange return codes for each type of
object or
interface. This lets you run
SUCCEEDED and
FAILED macros against it to determine the base success of the function call, without actually hanging because the actual
code to be run is
elsewhere.