Component Object Model Specification

Draft Version 0.9
October 24, 1995

Microsoft Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation

Component Object Model (COM) is an architecture and supporting infrastructure for building, using, and evolving component software in a robust manner.

The Component Object Model Specification contains the standard APIs supported by the COM Library, the standard suites of interfaces supported or used by software written in a COM environment, along with the network protocols used by COM in support of distributed computing. This specification is still in draft form, and thus subject to change.

This specification is divided into five parts, each of which contains one or more chapters.

Part I, Chapter 1, and Part II, Chapter 2 are available in HTML format:

The remaining chapters in Part II, and Parts III through V are available in Microsoft Word and PostScript formats (see download buttons below). For ease of online reading and printing, we've provided copies of the complete spec in Microsoft Word and PostScript formats. Click the buttons below to download these files.

Download Download the Component Object Model Specification in Microsoft Word format (zipped, 537K). Each chapter exists as a separate Word 6.0 document. The filenames for each document reflect the contents of that chapter (for example, "CH08 Security.doc"). The file "The COM Specification.DOC" is a Word 6.0 master document that holds all of the individual chapters together as well as provides the title page, table of contents, and appendix.

Download Download the Component Object Model Specification in PostScript format (zipped, 2.69MB). This download consists of a single file, "COM_Spec.PS", in portable PostScript format.

You may also wish to review the draft specification Inserting Multimedia Objects into HTML3 in W3C Tech Reports on http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TRinternet link. This spec extends HTML to support the insertion of multimedia objects, including Java applets, Microsoft Component Model (COM) objects (for example, OLE Controls and OLE Document embeddings), and a wide range of other media plug-ins. The approach allows objects to be specified in a general manner and provides the ability to override the default implementation of objects.

© 1996 Microsoft Corporation