Take

COM, Microsoft's 90's-era do-it-all layer of cross-library, cross-language, cross-machine interoperability whose foundations underlie .NET in spirit and the Windows Runtime in actuality is ridiculously complex, but in service of a great number of functions, and providing "automation" level support where everything could be called from scripts decades before PowerShell.

I was somehow tickled today to wonder what it would take to vend a COM interface in plain C (since most of the abstractions assume you would touch C++ with a five-foot pole), and Jeff Glatt has an eight-part series of articles on CodeProject introducing the relevant concepts piecemeal. Recommended reading to gain a higher level of understanding of how much COM does and, in some cases, how much of its hoops that it jumps through for you if you don't mind jumping through smaller, specific hoops.